Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
I work with a small theater in Seattle, Annex Theatre. Recently, we had an event where we needed to play a DVD. We have a really snazzy projector up, all HD and everything, and we were feeding it with a $60 flip-open travel DVD player. When this cranky piece of crap player refused to go beyond the first chapter on the DVD, I'd had enough.
I talked to our managing director, and figured out how much we could spend, and started looking at options. I quickly settled on the Pioneer DVD-V5000 and DVD-V8000 models as being likely, but then, buried deep in the search results at B&H, I found the HHB UDP-89.
This player looked like the answer to all my desires in a DVD player. It handles pretty much any format on a CD-sized disc with the notable exception of Blu-ray. It has highly reputable audio hardware, including balanced stereo out (which doesn't appear on any other DVD player I could find). It has the necessary front-panel buttons so it can be operated without a remote. It's only 1U high, which means it will take up less space in the equipment rack. Of course, it's also a $1000 player, but it looked like a good investment in the future, and would match our fancy projector well.
It finally arrived yesterday, and I spent a few minutes plugging it in and getting it temporarily situated in the equipment stack (the rack is still a bit of a pipe dream, at least for the stuff we have to access frequently).
When I pulled it out of the box, I had a very favorable first impression. This is a dense unit, and I suspect that if I open it up, I'm not going to find that density supplemented by weights (unlike some cheap consumer equipment I've seen). The front panel is very plainly a thick, milled piece of aluminum, very attractive and speaking favorably of the quality inside.
Once I got it powered on and had spent a few minutes playing with it, though, that favorable impression evaporated somewhat. The buttons feel quite cheap and plasticky, although they emit a loud click when pressed, so at least there's no question of "Did I press that button or not?"
The power-up process takes a shockingly long time, something like 10-20 seconds before it responds to any control inputs. It's not a big deal in the long run, but it's pretty surprising for something that's a new design. You have to wait for it to boot up before it will even stick out its tongue to accept a disc. The disc tray itself is thin and springy, which at first seems cheap, but then I realized that its springiness was its salvation -- it could be thin without being brittle and breakable.
Once I got a disc in (a CD, as there was a rehearsal going on that I didn't want to disrupt with a video projection), it quickly read it and was ready to go. I was pleased to see that the auto pause function was given its own, clearly labeled button. This will make it the favored CD player for production use, almost certainly.
I quickly realized why the auto pause button was so prominent: when you pause the playback, then skip to the next track, it will automatically start playing again, if auto pause is off! This is counter to every CD and MD player I've used in the last decade, and is going to screw up every first time operator of this player.
The information display is pretty minimal, a small two-line dot-matrix display with a few dedicated icons (CD, auto pause, play triangle and pause bars were the ones I noticed, though I'm sure there are others). There is no time button on the front panel, most likely in the interests of clarity, although I'd expect to find one on a pro CD or MD player. Still, a time button (for switching between at least elapsed track time and remaining track time) would be a welcome addition, even if it is a bit useless for a DVD player. I suspect the function is available via the remote control, although I didn't check.
Fortunately, the player is quicker to respond once it's playing a disc, as compared to start-up, but it's still a bit sluggish. I pressed a track skip button and it took a second to catch up -- a potentially fatal flaw when you need to skip several tracks quickly, particularly in a tense production moment. You'd better be counting button presses, because the display lags. I suspect Sony avoids this by making sure that the display is always quick to respond, even if the underlying system and mechanism is taking a moment to catch up.
Granted, this first impression doesn't actually say anything about the UDP-89 as a DVD player, but I was interested to see my own reaction to it. As there's little out there in terms of user review, I figured I'd share my reactions. I expect I'll have more to say later.
Just to ensure that I'm not leaving you with the wrong impression, I was overall quite favorably impressed. The build quality, with the exception of the plastic front panel buttons, seems to be top notch. The slow UI is something that could easily be corrected with a firmware update, which is a procedure clearly outlined in the manual, although no updates are currently available.
I'm looking forward to powering up the projector and putting the UDP-89 through its paces with a couple of different DVDs. If I can scrounge together enough cables, it'll be fun to hook up to the theater's 5.1 system and get real surround sound going. I'll try to come back to this topic in the future, and keep you updated on our snazzy new DVD player.
Posted at 10:45 permanent link category: /gadgets
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater