Price: $250 At A Glance: Onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio • Streaming options include Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand
Sony sells seven stand-alone Blu-ray players, ranging from its entry level BDP-S360 ($150, HT, July 2009) up to its Elevated Standard BDP-CX7000ES MegaChanger ($1,900, HT, March 2010). But one of the biggest complaints against Sony’s BD players has been the lack of networking features. Well, Sony has addressed that complaint with the BDP-N460. It includes a plethora of streaming options from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, YouTube, Slacker, and a host of other content providers—some more useful than others. Network connectivity is a great add-on feature, but how does the player perform as a disc player? Let’s find out…
Just the Facts
In the waterfall of Sony Blu-ray players, the BDP-N460 is a step up from Sony’s entry-level players. Aesthetically, it looks nearly identical to the BDP-S360, with a simple glossy black plastic facing that drops down to expose the disc tray. The only other buttons on the front are Play, Stop, Eject, and Power.
When it comes to hotbeds of high-end audio, South Africa is not the first place that comes to mind. Yet this is the home of <A href="http://www.vividaudio.com">Vivid Audio</A>, maker of beautifully curvaceous speakers, including the flagship Giya, which is available in two versions—the original G1 and the new, smaller G2 introduced at CES 2010.
A piece of conventional wisdom about the nature of online music sales ran into a brick wall last week when a court ruled that Pink Floyd's landmark album Dark Side of the Moon cannot be broken up and sold as individual songs.
I can't attest to how sturdy it is, and I certainly would think very carefully before trusting $20 worth of hardware to support a $4,000 projector, but I still have to applaud CrunchGear's Matt Burns' ingenuity. He built his own ceiling mount for...
The Panasonic Touch the Future Tour will let members of the public (that's you) in 15 cities get direct experience with the company's version of 3D technology, starting Monday March 15 in New York and finishing next month in Miami. See end of this story for other locales and dates.
With the analog audio section of this multi-part tome largely out of the way (though a listen to the audio from the Special Edition Oppo BDP-83 is still to come), I turned to video. All of the testing was done with duplicate copies of high quality Blu-ray discs. The players were compared directly, two at a time, with the disc in one of the players running roughly 12 seconds behind the other. Making allowances for a switching delay of about 5 seconds (which the players needed to re-sync with the display following the switch) this staggered cueing let me watch the same few seconds of program material first on one player and then on the other.
Reader K. Reid asked for a profile of ultra-high-end cables from <A href="http://www.nordost.com">Nordost</A>, and I'm only too happy to oblige. At the pinnacle of the company's extensive product range is the Odin line, which includes power cords, tonearm cables, analog and digital interconnects, and speaker cables.
Following a bare-knuckled fight that interrupted ABC's Oscar telecast to millions of New York area cable subscribers, the major cable operators are petitioning the Federal Communications Commission for new regulations that would prevent future blackouts during retransmission negotiations.
Price: $250 At A Glance: Onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio • Streaming options include Netflix and Amazon Video On Demand
