Question 4K player common sense? Or not?

MaryWhitehouse

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I’d like to try a 4K player with my current setup . So a Hisense 65b7100 and Pioneer lx82 receiver working in 3.1. With a top budget of £200. Don’t mind looking at secondhand at all.
My questions are this. Only sound can go through my receiver as it doesn’t handle 4K in anyway and I don’t want to change it. So should I only look at machines with 2 hdmi or are there machines with one hdmi and a coax or optical? After answering that then it’s semi technical. If the signal to the tv is digital and the signal to the receiver is digital then other than a quiet drive mechanism how much does the player really effect the image and sound? I’m a sucker for big, old av tech but unfortunately no 4K player has reached that stage yet.
Thanks
 
No 4k player has got to the Big AV tech yet?

You’ve obviously not seen the pioneer LX500 or even bigger the LX800. 😉

But yeah, can one with 2 HDMI outputs, one for audio and one for visual.
 
Hah sorry I meant come down to my budget like my receivers and blu ray players have. I’d LOVE a Pioneer 4K player to match the rest of my kit but no chance.
 
In my honest opinion, and it is purely my personal OPINION and nothing more, is that I wouldn't bother. Advantages to 4K ultra hd are true 4K resolution, HDR/dolby vision, better sound with Atmos and lossless audio formats and some of the better UHD players upscale lower resolutions better.

Now for my debbie downer view on it lol. 4K vs 1080p blu ray, meh, many people really can't tell the difference at normal distances and standard tv sizes. And your tv will upscale it to 4K anyway. So it kind of depends on how well your tv does upscaling. That tv probably isn't bad. Probably not the greatest, but most likely not the worst. From what I have seen they get decent reviews. All my 4K movies came with standard blu ray versions too. I have looked at both for every movie and I can't tell the difference in resolution between them. Both look great. The only differences I see is the 4K disks have HDR which changes the colors, how bright and how dark the picture gets. Turn off HDR and honestly the only difference I can see is the 4K ones are a little darker over all.

Which brings us to HDR. The jury still seems to be out on that. Some like it, some don't, some could care less. From what I have seen it really depends on what you are watching and what you are watching it on. On my older LCD tv I wasn't all that impressed. On my new OLED tv it like it a bit more. And dolby vision is even better. Which your tv doesn't have. Could I live without it? For sure, no question about it. It is not something I would pay extra money for or go out of my way to get. On my LCD tv only one input supported it and I had to go into the menu and enable it and stuff. I tried it, wasn't impressed and never really messed with it again. On my C9 its all automatic so I just kind of go with it.

The thing I like most about 4K uhd is the sound. To me the soundtracks are better and I like Atmos/DTS X. And again your system won't do Atmos or any of the other newer formats.

And not to mention 4K blu rays cost more.

Again, nothing more than my opinions incase you were interested. If you want to get one, get one. That is half the fun of this hobby for some people. Trying new stuff out.

After everything I said I am still considering getting a better 4K player than the one I have because it was a fairly cheap model and an early version so it lacks some features newer and more expensive ones have. It just seems like kind of a shame to pair a 100 dollar player with a thousand some dollar tv lol. So in the end I am not even going to listen to myself lmao. Just don't be shocked if you get one and you are not floored by the performance. I really wasn't. But then you might see something different than I did. It happens.
 
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Thanks Paul

Yeah the upscaling on this one is good to my eye so I think I’ll stick with Blu-ray. I can’t spend the money to get a 4k that I’d like aesthetically so there would be the hassle of hiding it away and having an IR remote work anyway.
For the money the TV is excellent. For me the next jump worth making would have been OLED and that was another £1000+ on top of this ones price and I just didn’t have that so bought a good budget tv and refreshed the receiver etc too. To great effect.

I think I’ll upgrade the subwoofer instead now.

Thanks for your reply.
 
Although I have a 4K player I still buy far more blu ray than I do UHD discs. The new 1917 was an exception and so is the UHD release of Jaws. Blu rays upscaled to 4K on my OLED certainly looks very good indeed matching, if not surpassing, the current 4K downloads of both Sky and Netflix.

HDR is different, it does make a difference and I do prefer it. However I will only fork out another £10 for a film I really want especially if the blu ray release doesn't have an Atmos or DTS:X soundtrack.

The Pioneer LX500 is a real beauty of a player though. Sounds wonderful.
 
The Pioneer LX500 is a real beauty of a player though. Sounds wonderful.

So there’s the other part of my question. If the lx500 is connected by HDMI to a receiver (I assume) then what influence does the player have on the sound?

The cost of the UHD discs (I know there are some deals about) is pretty steep!
 
So there’s the other part of my question. If the lx500 is connected by HDMI to a receiver (I assume) then what influence does the player have on the sound?

The cost of the UHD discs (I know there are some deals about) is pretty steep!
It's the quality of the pick up. The disc mechanism has an influence. The thing is built like a tank. The audio, I judge by music playback in 5.1, either from blu ray audio or video concerts as well as SACD multi channel. When it was connected to my old Denon X6200 the SACD playback was better than that from my previous Pioneer LX58 and Denon DBT 3313. I now have a Denon X6500 and multi channel playback has taken a notch upwards as the 6500 has a better processor than the previous 6200.

Stereo playback was also good via analogue although the analogue connection was to my Rega Elicit-R it was only shortlived as an experiment as I already had a standalone Marantz SACD player.

All the reviews of the LX500 have praised it's musical abilities as well as the PQ. All it is basically doing is reading those 0s and 1s but it does it so well. Players do differ in sound quality the worse I've ever owned was a Sony 370.
 
I totally agree the analogue sound can be very, very different. Hence using a Pioneer Lx71 CD playing duties in my 2 channel system too. But I don’t see technically how a digital signal is coloured or enhanced by the player.
 
I totally agree the analogue sound can be very, very different. Hence using a Pioneer Lx71 CD playing duties in my 2 channel system too. But I don’t see technically how a digital signal is coloured or enhanced by the player.
I've had three UD players in the last few years as I've mentioned all of which have run HDMI into a Denon AVR X6200 and the LX500 has been the best sounding one I've had. Should all, theoretically sound the same with the Denon doing the DAC work but they don't.

The interesting add on to this story is that I also had a Marantz cd6006 running into the Denon and I tried the optical out on the Marantz to see if it Denon did a better job. It didn't but still imparted the warmth of the Marantz signature sound. Just to add though that the Denon was crap at stereo music and now even the new X6500 just gets used for multi channel SACD and not for stereo listening.
 

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