CUSTOM INSTALLATION HOW-TO

PERFORMANCE

Compared with other recent Blu-ray players, the Pioneer's start-up routine was on the sluggish side: About 25 seconds passed before its disc tray would open up and accept discs after I pressed the Power button. It took about the same amount of time for regular (non-BD-Live) Blu-ray Discs to load up and display an image onscreen, while more feature-packed titles took a minute or longer to get to the old, familiar FBI warning screen.

The player's Scan 1 and Scan 2 search modes both delivered smooth forward and reverse picture quality when I scanned through discs in search of a particular scene. Pressing the remote control's Display button called up loads of useful information, including a bar showing elapsed time versus total disc time, a readout detailing video codec and variable data rate, and another readout with soundtrack details like codec, sample rate, and total number of channels employed.

Pioneer fixed its attention on making the BDP-09FD a reference for both video and audio playback, so I chose to start my evaluation with audio. The high-rez (96 kHz/24-bit) stereo PCM soundtrack on the Neil Young Live at Massey Hall DVD sounded incredibly lifelike on my system. Young's acoustic guitar on "Old Man" was full and dynamic as it rang out in the almost eerily silent hall, and his vocals came across both crisp and airy. Movies with lively Dolby TrueHD soundtracks like Body of Lies also showed off the Pioneer's audio chops. For example, in a scene where Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) moves against a terrorist safe house in Iraq, the sonic maelstrom of machine-gun fire and helicopters nearly nailed me to my seat. Even so, softer elements, like the calm voices of CIA handlers monitoring the action by way of high-altitude drones, managed to cut through and blend seamlessly with the action.

Video performance was flawless, with the BDP-09FD passing every torture test I threw at it. In Body of Lies, the fine texture of the sandy landscape in the desert scenes came through crisply. And the player's surgically precise noise reduction helped to tame grainy-looking shots like the opening one where the cleric Al Saleem addresses his followers. With the 4:4:4 HDMI Color Space option selected, I wasn't able to see much of a difference in picture quality on the 55-inch Sony KDL-55XBR8 LCD TV that I used for testing, although ramp test patterns on Blu-ray test discs looked notably smoother with this setting enabled.

BOTTOM LINE

Pioneer's Elite BDP-09FD truly is a statement piece: a player that offers stunning audio and video performance and is built to withstand a nuclear blast. Its dual HDMI outputs, high-end analog-audio section, and numerous adjustments for fine-tuning picture and sound make it the perfect match for no-holds-barred home theater systems. The one stumbling block here - and it's a big one if you need to watch your expenses - is price. You can find Blu-ray Disc players out there for a few hundred bucks that provide many of the same features as the BDP-09FD and come close to rivaling its performance in most areas. But if A/V quality is your primary thing and money is no object, then Pioneer has your player.