Don't know about ugly exactly. Unobtrusive design, slim, which is always a plus. Never could get away from those bulky players a few companies used to do when the first Blu-ray decks came in and later. Arcam step forward...BDP100, big box, half empty inside. Give me a sleek design anyday. Denon had it right with their 3930, which combined both but that was over a decade ago and pre Blu-ray.
Y'all are giving the design of these Sony ES players too much credit, in my opinion. Those "unobtrusive ... slim" flip-down front-panel designs are basically the same as the crappy designed players they were marketing a decade ago, like this Sony BDP-S360 blu-ray player that I have long since relegated to our garage for playing CDs (in part because Sony abandoned firmware updates and other support for that player very quickly, obsoleting it from a blu-ray-media-playing perspective well before its time ran out physically). When you press the eject button, the entire front panel flips down as the very slim disc tray slides out from the transport. It always felt and acted very cheap, so I'm wondering how similar the ES series flip-down front-panel designs are to those old crappy disc players. BDP-S360 EDIT: Compared to the UBP-X1100ES ... https://hdguru.com/sony-high-end-ubp-x1100es-uhd-blu-ray-player-arrives/
Those crappy old players that are still doing sterling service eight years on, in my S370's case?! Yeah, I'll take that thanks!
Yep, all very "only a mother" / "face made for radio", etc...! Annoyingly, Roksan have come along with their Blak CD player which I'd ordinarily avoid given my comments above, yet, it's got a certain appeal...!
Did Sony keep updating the firmware of your 370? They sure dropped the ball on my 360 model quickly, so that some newer blu-ray discs wouldn't play in it at all. For me, the ability for a blu-ray player to play new release blu-ray discs would be part of "sterling service." Craig.
Right, if you want to play back 5.1 on the Sony player, you have to do it through HDMI. The analog outputs are meant for stereo playback.
That’s true, and a bit of an odd design choice, but the rest of the player is metal, with a metal brace and beam construction that Sony likes to tout in its marketing materials.
They're almost identical. And don't get me wrong but cheap is as cheap was. To the point of just two buttons and on most of the models, no display. How f ing cheap can you get to squeeze your profits. I was looking at old Sony CD Players, ES style, of yesteryear and man, were they a thing of beauty. Lot's of buttons on those! Direct track access without a Remote......... How Far The Industry has Fallen. Beave
I was watching a bit of Wimbledon tennis this past week and noticed a lot of oppo advertising. Click the link for more info. ‘We’re trying to capture China’s next generation’: The strategy behind Wimbledon’s Oppo deal
I bought a Marantz SA-10 I noticed the advertising on court from Oppo as well. Did anyone see the ads with Roger Federer announcing Oppo's latest 8k players the 303 and 305? Just dreaming....
Can't recall offhand but it still works, plays well and it just needs to play DVDs and Blu-ray discs. After that, firmware upgrades aren't a big deal really.
The inability for Sony BDP-360 model to play certain new release blu-ray discs - due to Sony's ambivalence/refusal to keep updating firmware for models more than a few years old - goes back as far as at least 2015, as documented in this thread: XTC - Oranges & Lemons Blu-ray - clarification That experience, which on the other hand directly prompted me to purchase my first Oppo player, has soured me on purchasing any Sony products again in the future. (Combined with earlier experiences such as the worst-sounding stereo receiver I've ever owned, back in the early '90s, was a Sony. It sounded so brittle and thin and ugly. Within six months of regretting swapping my Yamaha receiver for it, thinking it was going to be an upgrade since it was so much more expensive, I had gotten rid of the Sony receiver and purchased a Denon that took me back to relative warmth and coziness of sound.)
Ugly or not, the 1100 is the cheapest universal player with analog outs in the marketplace. Who knows, it might be the last at this rate. They’ll probably be refurbs on eBay for less than half the price sooner or later if the 1000es is any guide. It uses the same Mediatek chip that Pioneer uses in the LX-500 and OPPO used in their 4k players so video quality should be the same. If the DAC has been upgraded from the 1000es, I couldn’t find anything. In fact, it looks like the exact same player as the 1000es with Dolby Vision added (in the stupidest way possible). A review from our friends over in the UK. ETA in Europe is July. Sony UBP-X1100ES 4K Blu-ray Player Review BTW, if anyone is thinking about the Panny UB820 as a CD player- don’t. I bought and returned an open box from Best Buy. If you need the tone mapping, HDR Optimiser or have a projector, it’s great. Otherwise, it’s an overpriced POS with painfully horrible AQ from the analogs. I’m saying this as a decades long Panny fan. Stay far away.
FWIW: I think that buying one of today's universal players with analog outs is just a bad plan with the quality of the players being made today. You'd be far better off getting a unit with only HDMI outputs and using it with an HDMI de-embedder to feed a genuinely good DAC.
We are aware of that already, aren't we? The only reason that I can see of having RCA outs is if you intend to play SACD's and have an exceptional DAC inside of the unit. Most audio people who are concerned with this are concerned only with 2-channel stereo and not multi-channel audio and those individuals buy dedicated high end CD players. I personally would opt to invest my money in an external DAC, rather than pay double for a Oppo "5" unit, with the better DAC than the "3" units. I use the HDMI out for my processor to decode into multi-channel. I never use my 203's analog outs, preferring to use the Oppo as a transport to my main system DAC for stereo.
I agree with the first sentence, but not the second. I believe that the majority of the people who are SACD enthusiasts are into two-channel "high-res" playback, rather multichannel playback. And my comments were targeted at the high-res stereo crowd, not the multichannel crowd. FWIW: I have been using a DVD player for several years now as a transport for high-res media playback through my DAC. This used to be nearly impossible to do, but not today. With the right HDMI de-embedder board it is possible to send not only high-res PCM, but genuine DSD as well to any DSD capable DAC which features an I2S input.
