Sony’s 400-disc BDP-CX7000ES Blu-ray Megachanger

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There’s a certain audience who will see this 400-disc changer for $1900 and consider it a steal–just remember Sony’s older DVD Changer cost over $3000!! However, then there’s our audience who would think about how much storage they could build for $2k and rip the movies themselves. That being said, I’m happy to read this thing does its job pretty reliably and peppy, but agree with the reviewer that shame on Sony for not having ANY built in memory and requiring USB stick for BD-Live–well, minor ding since BD-Live is pretty useless.

 

Electronic House

Because it’s part of Sony’s ES line, the company packed it with high-end processing specs, yet it left out some of the fun features you see in a few of the more plebian BD players (see sidebar for the Cons). On the video side, it upscales 480 resolution DVDs to 1080p and outputs them through HDMI. Rather than just let BD movies slide though in their native glory, it also greases them with something Sony calls Super Bit Mapping, which turns 8-bit video content into 14-bit content in an effort to smooth surfaces. For audio, the player can handle all the current formats (DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD) and send their bitstreams flowing out via HDMI. You can also take advantage of analog 7.1 jacks or the digital optical/coax outputs if your preamp or receiver is a pre-HDMI vintage. Under the hood there’s a 192kHz/24bit digital-to-analog converter.