“This isn’t really a Blu-ray player” – Cambridge Audio 650BD Interview
Ashley Kramer quizzes Adam Shaw-Cotterill, Cambridge Audio’s International Sales Manager, about the company’s distinguished new 650BD Blu-ray player
Witchdoctor: Tell us more about the new Blu-ray player. It’s been a long time coming.
Adam Shaw-Cotterill: This isn’t really a Blu-ray player, it’s the 650BD Universal Disk Player. There’s a perception that Blu-ray players are very good for Blu-ray but many are no good with DVD and very poor with audio. The thing with Blu-ray is that it’s very hard to personalise a Blu-ray player. Anyone can make a unique DVD player – you buy a chipset, tinker with the DACs… but for Blu-ray, there are very few companies making the base platform, so a lot of products out there don’t just share the same architecture, they are actually the same physical machine, just in a different box. People claim to have played with different players and seen the same results. Well, of course they have, they’re seeing the same machine over and over.
The 650BD is a collaboration between us and one of our manufacturing partners, who are one of the biggest DVD manufacturers in the world, and it uses an entirely new chipset with some state of the art software inside.
One of Blu-ray’s biggest limitations is that delay before the disc starts playing, but we built in two chipsets to speed up that initial start period. The dual chips allow us to concentrate equally on video and audio. From the video perspective, in addition to the state of the art Blu-ray video processor, we put in a superb 1080p upscaler, so DVDs look their absolute best. This is often an afterthought on many players – it’s there because it has to be there, but the quality isn’t a priority.
WD: So audio quality has been a major part of the design process?
A S-C: Audio-wise, it’s a real universal player and will play just about any format – Blu-ray, DVD, SACD, DVD-Audio along with copied DVDs and CDs, MP3s… There’s a full eight channel analogue output with onboard decoding, which we’ve tweaked for optimum performance along with all the other audio components; this isn’t just a cheap universal audio platform. We’ve even paid attention to isolating internal noise and keeping it away from the audio stages, because this is basically a PC and they’re filled with noise which can adversely affect the sound.
We’ve tried to design a product that excels on the picture and the sound rather than ticking every box on every features list. Many people will never use all the features on a player but quality sound, sharp video and ease of use will be enjoyed every time they use it.
WD: What about functionality beyond the video and audio playback?
A S-C: We’ve paid careful attention to that, building in two USB slots for example – which allow owners to upgrade firmware but also support external USB devices including hard drives. I’ve tried a 1Tb drive and it was fine.
2 Comments