At long last the eagerly awaited Arcam BDP300 Blu-Ray players arrived with us on Wednesday. Already having customer orders for the players we were lucky enough to have one that we could open up for demo....
The player was planted straight into our cinema demo room which has a system comprising of Anthem MRX500 amp with PMC Twenty series speakers and REL subwoofer....
Needless to say we were isntantly impressed!. The first thing we played was Avatar, the improvement in picture qaulity was quite surprising (we were using a Pioneer LX55). The very fine detail just was staggering bust most surprisingly was the improvement in the depth of the image, the sense of scale and depth of the opening scenes showing space and then the forested area was so much better that we rewound the disc and watched it again!..
But from my point of view the best thing about this player is the sound quality. Most people that know me are aware that my views on home cinema hinge on the sound quality, I feel that the picture quality of a vast majority of most player screen/projectors are simply fantastic but there are so many systems that fall over on their sound quality. I watch a lot of live music concerts and sadly a lot of blu-ray players can sound awful even through very respectable amp and speaker packages. When testing new players I will head for my favourite Joe Bonamassa Blu-ray and play one of the acoustic tracks, so many players can sound falt and dull or even messy and aggressive it surprises me, as if manufacturers are going all out to improve picture quality and neglecting the sound qaulity. But not with the Arcam.....all I could think was: WOW!!!!!
When you hear a player that has very good sound quality you then realise how much of an influence it has on movies just like Avatar. Ignoring the dialogue you realise how the sound track is subliminally setting the mood for the film, a good example is the old film "7" where the detectives are just about to come across the serial killer and are in an appartment block with guns at the ready... there is hardly any dialogue but the sound track makes it terrifying!
I've only played a couple of music concerts and CDs on the player but already it has proved to be absolutely brilliant!
As with the last Aracm Blu-Ray the set-up menu is very simple and easy to navigate so you can get it up and running very quickly....
If you would like to read more about the player in detail here is the link to the Arcam product page: http://www.arcam.co.uk/products,fmj,bd-players,BDP300.htm but my advice would be to come in and have a good listen in the demo room... feel free to bring a few of your own discs in....
A bit of Jeff Beck next I think....
