Pioneer BDP-51FD User Manual

Page 3

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Pioneer BDP-09FD Elite Blu-ray Player (Benchmark) - Page 3

the ability to test your Network Connection

without having to download an update.

With some previous players I have used, the

only way to make sure that you are online

correctly is to try to update the software,

which can then take a long time, but the

Pioneer lets you simply test to make sure it’s

working correctly.

Outside of the Initial Setup menu, there

is a separate Video Adjustments menu. It

contains some presets for certain display types

(LCD, Plasma, Pioneer Plasma, Projector)

as well as three custom types that you can

configure. These will let you easily change

certain settings (Black Level, Pure Cinema

Mode, Block and Mosquito noise reduction,

Gamma Correction) to fine tune the output

of the player based on the source material

and your display.

As many of us are routing all of our

components through a receiver or processor

into a single input on our display, we can’t

easily calibrate that input to be exact for

all of our sources, but using the settings on

the Pioneer we could adjust the Pioneer

internally to make those small adjustments

that it might need. You could also use the

memory settings based on if you are watching

a Blu-ray movie (which would typically have

a much lower level of blocking and noise

due to more advanced codecs and space) or

a DVD, which might need more block noise

reduction due to the lower quality MPEG-2

compression used.

Selecting your output resolution can be done

while you are watching video, in addition to

your initial settings. The Pioneer features all

of the common output formats (1080p at

both 60 and 24 fps, 720p60, 1080i60, 480p

and 480i), but also features Auto, where the

player chooses based on what the display tells

it over HDMI, and Source Direct, which will

output the media at whatever format it was

recorded at. This is an option for those using

an external video processor or scaler , but I

chose to stick with 1080p60 as my display

will not support 1080p24. The Pioneer

always detected my display as 1080i60 for

some reason, no matter if I was using the

HDMI through my receiver or connected

directly to the display, but that was simple

to fix. While the BDP-09FD took a bit

longer to setup than most players due to its

plethora of features, the setup process was

very intuitive and it didn’t have me jumping

back and forth between different menus as

some equipment can.

PerForMance – MusIc

As soon as I had the Pioneer hooked up in

my system, the first thing that I wanted to

test was its audio performance. The Wolfson

DAC’s have been used in many other highly

regarded, dedicated CD players and I wanted

to hear how they would sound. Listening to

“Kid A” from Radiohead, the Pioneer offered

up a very refined, relaxed presentation and I

listened to the whole disc without any fatigue,

completely enjoying the experience. Moving

forward or back a track was a little slow

compared to my Oppo player, but I never

had any issues beyond that. After listening to

a few more albums on the Pioneer over the

week, I wanted to evaluate it head-to-head

with the Oppo, which is a very nice budget

CD player in addition to being a fine DVD

player, and see how it compared.

“The BDP-09FD performed very

well across the board on all of our

benchmark tests.”

Taking some time to make sure all of the

settings on the receiver and the players

were setup correctly and that the receiver

wasn’t introducing anything additional into

the signal, I setup some albums to play at

the same time so I could easily switch back

and forth between them. Additionally, I

found that using the Pioneer in Pure Audio

Mode 1 (no video signals at all) produced a

noticeable increase in sound quality during

CD playback, so I left that enabled while I

performed these listening tests as well. To my

ears, the Oppo provided me a bit more high-

end detail and a bit of a wider soundstage,

whereas the Pioneer provided some extra

weight behind the voices and instruments.

Listening to just a human voice, the Oppo

would let me hear a little bit of extra detail at

the top end, but the Pioneer would express

the power that they were putting behind

their singing.

The presentation of the Oppo was more

forward as well, putting the vocals in front

in the speakers, where the Pioneer seemed to

pull them back behind the speakers a bit and

stay more relaxed. With Pure Audio disabled,

I was able to easily tell the players apart and

felt that the soundstage of the Pioneer shrunk,

and the instruments and vocals sounded like

they were hiding behind a curtain, losing a

good bit of detail. In the end, while I liked

the extra detail that the Oppo added, some

might find that it’s more fatiguing to listen

for a long period of time, or prefer the extra

weight that the Pioneer can put behind the

music. Given that the Oppo player has been

a consistently well regarded CD player, I

think Pioneer can be happy with how the

BDP-09FD sounded.

For playing back music from non-CD

sources, the Pioneer supports very few extra

codecs (most bitrate mp3s and lower bitrate

WMA’s), but no lossless formats such as

FLAC, and no support for WAV files beyond

16-bit and 44.1 KHz sampling rates. The

new chipset that Pioneer used for this player

was chosen for pure performance on Blu-

ray, DVD, and CD playback and support

for more advanced media codecs wasn’t

important in comparison to that. It did

manage to playback the mp3’s that I tested

it with, but I would doubt that many people

are going to purchase a player like this and

used it to play back lossy, compressed audio

files.

I did have one big fault with the Pure Audio

setting, however. The load times on the

Pioneer are not exceptionally fast, in part due

to its use of a recorder transport that is more

accurate but not as speedy as the typically

disc transport, and while it is loading you are

not able to stop it until it’s read the contents

of a CD, or gotten to the menu of a movie.

Unfortunately, Pure Audio does not have a

setting where you can have it be automatically

enabled for CD playback and then disabled

for BluRay or DVD playback, and to disable

it you need to stop the disc and physically