Someone should remind this over-achieving Pioneer Blu-ray player that it only sells for £500, chides
The BDP-LX58 is Pioneer’s Blu-ray Prince Regent. By designation it ranks below the brand’s flagship LX88 (and sells for half as much), but it doesn’t doff its cap to anyone. It looks beautiful and is built like a hotel room safe. A 1mm-thick steel-plated bonnet keeps a lid on erroneous vibration, while the chassis features a 1.6mm-thick base, reinforced by a 3mm plate. In operation it’s library quiet. You’ll want to load discs simply for the pleasure of ejecting them again.
Got a new Ultra HD TV? The BDP-LX58 upscales 1080p to 2160p (keeping the frame rate of the original source), with 4:4:4 chroma upsampling. A dedicated texture processing algorithm, coupled to jaggy-beating edge processing, proves astonishingly convincing.
As Will Smith goes to visit his gran in I, Robot (Blu-ray) to show of his new Converse All Stars and score some sweet potato pie, the city is beautifully rendered. Freeze-frame Smith at the door and marvel at the tonality and fine detail of the building's brickwork and futuristic trapping. Given that all the visual FX would have been rendered at 2K resolution anyway, it's difficult to imagine just how better a pukka 4K source could look.
There are two HDMI outputs; a main and a sub. This duality can be used in different ways. You can feed both a flatpanel and a projector with a mimicked feed, or you can route audio only through the secondary output. There's also a digital coaxial audio output (but no optical port), gold-plated analogue phonos and an Ethernet jack. Two USB ports are provided front and back.
There’s also a Zero Signal Terminal which effectively uses your AVR to provide a Reference GND. Just run a phono lead from the player to a spare input on your receiver. The deck ships with a button-strewn backlit IR remote but will also work with the brand's iControl AV5 app.
Universal credit where it's due
The BDP-LX58 is Hi-Res Audio certifi ed (which is to say it has a badge) and brandishes an ESS Sabre32 Ultra ES9011 192kHz/32-bit DAC beneath the hood. The Hi-Res Audio branding simply denotes that the player is capable of 92kHz/24-bit or above WAV/FLAC file playback. It’ll play Super Audio CDs and DVD-Audio, too, should you have any. For further sonic refi nement it off ers PQLS, a low-jitter handshake for owners of compatible Pioneer AV receivers.
Don’t network this deck thinking it’s an online entertainment hub, though. You get YouTube and Picasa, and that's it. Pioneer has seemingly given up trying to compete with the mega brands when it comes to sourcing apps.
The deck is DLNA 1.5 certifi ed and file compatibility is solid. The Pioneer, as advertised, unspooled DSD 2.8MHz and 24-bit FLAC files, along with MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, APE, AIFF and ALAC. It’ll also smooch with MKV, AVI, WMV and MP4 video. However, if you have a lot of music stored on a NAS expect to set aside some time to laboriously scroll through your album listings.
Speaking of time, this is not a machine built for speed. My Java-heavy BD copy of Goldfinger squanders 66 seconds to go from tray-in to menu, while a simpler concert disc takes 37 seconds to do the same. But the wait is worthwhile. Image quality is exceptional.
Pioneer will tell you this is down to a proprietary Precise Pixel Drive image processor with Picasso-like HD detail enhancer and triple noise reduction (NR), but you’ll be too busy staring deep into its pictures to care. On the NR side, Component Frame Noise cleverly reduces the grainy Gaussian noise typically found in skyscapes, while Block Noise and Mosquito Noise reduction combat familiar MPEG errors. The result is gloriously cinematic.
When a barely-conscious Katniss is pulled from the disintegrating dome on my well-worn copy of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Blu-ray, the screen is awash with fine detail. Crisp embers fl oat in the air, multi-hued flames lick around the debris and heavily-leaved trees bend and shake as metalwork falls through them. This picture has depth and vibrancy.
The player doesn't disappoint sonically, either. Multichannel is downright magnifi cent. As battleships collided in 300: Rise of an Empire I felt certain my living room would sink into the Aegean in sympathy. And the player has two-channel chops. Tori Amos’ Trouble's Lament (FLAC, HD Tracks), presents the singer/songwriter centre-stage, insistent and tremulous, guitar work smooth as ice. The LX58 images with uncanny precision. Sonny Rollins' saxophone jazzes through St. Thomas (FLAC, HD Tracks) with tangible weight. Yes, the step-up BDP-LX88 sounds even better, but not by much.
On the debit side, I found current firmware disappointingly buggy. On audition the player locked up and became unresponsive several times when scouring YouTube and navigating my network and USBs. My only recourse was to power cycle. Hopefully this will be fixed with firmware updates.
Can I get a napkin, please?
Built to impress, with a droolworthy AV performance, Pioneer’s BDP-LX58 is easily a match for high-end decks costing a good deal more. Even with UHD Blu-ray looming, I suspect many will find this drop-dead gorgeous player difficult to resist.
Specifications
3D: Yes
UPSCALING: Yes. To 2160p
MULTIREGION: No. Region B BD/R2 DVD
HDMI: Yes. 2 x HDMI v2.0
COMPONENT: No
MULTICHANNEL ANALOGUE: No
DIGITAL AUDIO: Yes. Coaxial digital output
ETHERNET: Yes
BUILT IN WI-FI: No (via dongle only)
SACD/DVD-A: Yes/Yes
DOLBY TRUEHD/DTS-HD DECODING: Yes/Yes
DOLBY TRUEHD/DTS-HD BITSTREAM: Yes/Yes
DIMENSIONS: 435(w) x 118(h) x 338(d)mm
WEIGHT: 9.9kg
FEATURES: 2 x USB inputs; iOS/Android app control; RS-232 control; Zero Signal Terminal; DLNA media playback (DSD 2.8MHz, FLAC, MP3, WMA, AAC, WAV, ape, AIFF, ALAC, MKV, AVI, WMV, MP4); YouTube and Picasa clients; PQLS bitstream