Best Buys – Audio & AV – July 2019

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Best Buys Audio & AV 2019-#2

PERFORMANCE
Very little set-up is required with this player since
there’s no Wi-Fi. Just plug in the cables and away
you go. And our first impression was one of true
quality as the tray slides out with almost none
of the characteristic mechanical whirr. It’s the
smoothest tray we’ve seen in a decade.
Hooray for full-function remote controls (see
right). The one provided with this player has lots
of keys, so you can enter numbers and change
things like audio track or subtitle without digging
through menus. There are keys for changing player
resolution, and there’s even a ‘Source Direct’
setting so that if you prefer to use an external
scaler, you don’t have to fiddle with settings all the
time. Unusual keys: one to change HDR function-
ality, another to change HDMI colour settings.
There’s even one for changing the playback area
for SACDs between CD layer, stereo section,
multichannel section. These things can also be
changed through the set-up menu.
We started with those SACDs — Roxy Music’s
‘Avalon’, a few tracks from ‘The Dark Side of the
Moon’ — and DVD Audio discs for analogue
playback, playing through a high-quality stereo
system, and the sound was truly first-class, with
a superb stereo soundstage and flawless decoding
of the disc content. The performance was similar
with high quality music material played from the
network. This is a fine music source.
We moved onto movies, and the joys of Ultra
High Definition, the consumer version of 4K,
which brings not only the benefits of higher
resolution but also more bits for colour definition
and also High Dynamic Range, extending the
ability to graduate brightness. This unit supports
Dolby Vision picture encoding for High Dynamic
Range in addition to regular HDR10. Dolby
Vision is the better system, allowing 12 bits along
with dynamic metadata than can define the HDR
presentation scene by scene (though HDR10+ is
on the way from certain manufacturers to compete
with this advantage). Here the picture quality was
as good as it gets with Ultra-HD.
Upscaling from 1080p, 1080i and even 576i
to Ultra-HD output was also very good indeed.
There was no way of changing deinterlacing

settings, but the

automatic performance

was extremely good. It

was not tripped up by any

of our 576i/50 test clips.

It was tricked briefly by

the most difficult bit of

‘Miss Potter’ on 1080i/50

Blu-ray. That was the

only misbehaviour detected with this unit.

We moved on to the perils of network

streaming. But gigabit Ethernet connectivity

brings peace of mind in being able to stream

bigger files without slowing up the ability of

your network. We fired up the DLNA controller

software on an Android tablet and sent a

100Mbps Ultra-HD video from an external NAS

drive to the player. With most devices this stutters,

whether played by Wi-Fi or by Ethernet, as the

data rate is just a little too high for 100Mbps

Ethernet (a mere tenth the speed of gigabit) to

handle without having to pause and buffer.

With this player, it just played, smoothly and

perfectly. Encouraged, we shot some random video

of our own at 200Mbps, the highest our camera

would do, then tried to play that back from the

network. Again, perfect. (That turned out to be

1.1GB for a 60-second clip!)

The various UHD clips we’ve gathered over the

years all played perfectly and looked glorious with

one exception. Even though the unit supports

Dolby Vision on Ultra-HD discs, it didn’t

recognise it in a couple of clips streamed from my

server. It played them, but they came out with

funny colours. A firmware correction would likely

fix that.

The unit played every clip we had available,

from old SD MPEG2 taken from broadcast TV,

through to HEVC HDR at Ultra HD. It was fine

with an MKV movie. It was even fine with an

ancient WMV thing from a decade ago.

It wasn’t perfect with photos — by sending

through an Ultra-HD resolution test image, it

was clear that it was being bottlenecked to 1080p

rather than full resolution being preserved. But

only with pictures — the same test image as a

UHD video file was displayed at full resolution.

All music up to the

specified maximum

sampling worked very

nicely too. Thanks

to the fast Ethernet

connection, even

DSD128 streamed

flawlessly (DSD128 has

a bit-rate of 11.3Mbps).

What you won’t find

with this player are any

interfaces for internet

services such as Spotify

or Netflix, nor is there

Apple AirPlay.

CONCLUSION

The Pioneer

UDP-LX500 is a

seriously impressive

universal disc player,

very close to the perfect

disc player, short of the

photos, and perhaps

being a touch more

responsive. That’s

very little to complain

about in a product this

versatile, with output

of such quality.

Pioneer UDP-LX500

UHD Blu-ray player

• First-class all-round performance


• Gloriously smooth disc tray


• Gigabit Ethernet


• Seems to run network photos through a
  1080p bottleneck

Price: $1999

Tested with firmware: UDP-LX500 V01.02

Inputs: 1 x Ethernet (gigabit rated), 2 x USB

(1 on front panel)

Outputs: 1 x HDMI (A/V), 1 x HDMI (audio

only), 1 x optical digital audio, 1 x coaxial

digital audio, 1 x stereo analogue audio

Others: 1 x RS-232C, 1 x Zero Signal

Dimensions (whd): 435 x 118 x 337mm

Weight: 10.3kg

Warranty: Two years

Contact: Powermove Distribution

Telephone: 08 8338 5540

Web: http://www.pioneeraudio.com.au

“If you want quality, not to mention all

the movie extras and the indefinable

joy of actual ownership, a disc player

remains the source of choice...”