Cambridge Azur752BD Blu-ray Disc Player
For those averse to components with cooling fans, the 752BD is
fanless and quiet in operation other than the slight noise from the disc-
spinning spindle motor. The 752BD’s remote control is slimmer than
most with a gently curved bottom and flat, metal top-plate. The back-
light nicely illuminates the text or icon on each button, but you must
manually press the backlight button otherwise the remote stays dark
when you press buttons. The bottom of the remote has a silky rubber
coating that feels great but doesn’t contribute a lot to maintaining a
solid grip on the remote. The centrally located navigation wheel is sur-
rounded with a circle of eight more buttons that would sometimes get
mistaken for the navigation wheel itself. Familiarity with the remote over
time reduced the tendency to press the wrong button, but with so
many other remotes not having additional buttons that close to the nav-
igation wheel, perhaps it would be a better ergo choice to place that
outer circle of buttons a bit farther from the navigation controls. The
752BD’s owner’s manual is excellent, with clear and concise descrip-
tions of functions and options. The machine is well packed and comes
out of the box wrapped in a “Cambridge blue” fabric protective bag.
Video Performance
Blu-ray Disc players have reached a pinnacle of video image quali-
ty that is putting most of them more or less on the same plane when it
comes to how they present Blu-ray image quality. For a while, the
PlayStation
®
3 and OPPO BDP-83 and 83SE had a pretty hard lock on
great looking and accurate images from Blu-ray discs. But from that
period in time (ca. 2009) forward, Blu-ray Disc players, as a group,
have gotten more and more accurate. Of course, this may not hold true
at the low end of the price range for Blu-ray Disc players, but for mid-
range and high-end Blu-ray Disc players, accuracy seems to have
improved steadily, until we have reached the point we are at today with
most Blu-ray Disc players producing images that are very similar. Back
in the days of analog video, manufacturers could (and would) play with
the outputs to massage the images in whatever ways they thought
would produce more demand for their product. There wasn’t much
focus on accuracy. These days, manufacturers seem to have adopted
the motto “accurate Blu-ray Disc players are the best Blu-ray Disc
players.” The Azur 752BD is another disc player that really gets Blu-ray
image quality right. There’s literally nothing to complain about or pick at
when it comes to the image quality you get from Blu-ray Discs. What is
encoded on the disc is what you see on your display. And that’s exact-
ly as it should be. If we want to mess around with images, there are
plenty of controls elsewhere (including in the 752BD) that allow all
sorts of image accuracy mischief if you are bent on that sort of thing.
Playback of DVDs is one area where performance issues still differ-
entiate indifferent (usually cheaper) Blu-ray Disc players from the better
machines. It is not easy to make compressed-to-death DVD resolution
look fantastic on HD video displays. The 752BD has slightly different
video processing on the two HDMI outputs. HDMI 1 is the primary out-
put. If you set up the machine so that HDMI 1 sends video and HDMI 2
sends audio (or is not used at all), you’ll get the best possible image
quality from DVD, as this configuration option will process DVD images
through the Marvell Qdeo video processor. The 751BD was, I thought,
just a bit shy of the best DVD upconversion available at that time
(2011). It would appear in DVD images as a little extra softness and
graininess compared to the best DVD upconversion. But the 752BD
appears to be tweaked slightly so that it now matches the best DVD
upconversion I’ve seen short of Lumagen’s Radiance video proces-
sors, which still have a small edge. What you think of the DVD upcon-
version quality will have a lot to do with the transfer quality present on
the DVD in question. Some of them are just horrible to look at on HD
displays. For example, the DVD transfer of
The Dark Knight
is pretty
abysmal. Grainy, noisy, loaded with easily visible compression artifacts
in every frame, horrible looking aliasing on any lines that are anything
less than perfectly vertical or perfectly horizontal, and even moiré
artifacts at times. It’s pretty shameful that a major studio would release
a movie that looks that bad on DVD. On the other hand, the DVD ver-
sion of
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
is among the best transfers
of live action to DVD that I can recall seeing. So if 10 people go out to
have a demo of the 752BD and half use
TDK
and the other half use
MI:GP
, there are going to be very mixed reports about the relative
goodness or badness of the DVD upconversion. Nothing can fix the
problems in
TDK
, not even Lumagen’s mighty Radiance processors. It
looks terrible all the time. So choose your evaluation movies carefully if
you value DVD upconversion quality. Computer animation on DVD
looks so perfect through almost any disc player that you won’t learn
much from that either. The best choices are transfers that are some-
where in the middle… not too perfect, but not as bad as
TDK
.
The 752BD sailed through the torture tests on the HQV DVD
Benchmark evaluation disc, matching the performance of the best
Outputs - HDMI (2 on back), Composite (AV) (1 for diagnostics),
Stereo RCA analog (1), Eight Multichannel analog RCA (1), Coax
Digital (1), TOSLink optical (1), Ethernet 10/100 (1), Wireless N with
included adapter (1),
Inputs - HDMI (1 front, 1 back), USB (1 front, 2 back), Coax Digital
(1), TOSLink optical (1), Wired IR input (1 back)
Features
Wolfson WM8740 24-bit, 192-kHz DACs, 10 channels for stereo
and multichannel analog
Brushed aluminum face plate
Selectable digital filters
4K video upconversion option
2D to 3D conversion option
Blu-ray 3D support
Faster disc loading and response to remote control commands
than previous generations
Supports media streaming of many file formats including: AVCHD,
MP4, AVI, MKV, WAV, FLAC
Support for network media playback (images, music, video)
MHL compatibility (connect compatible portable devices for media
playback and battery charging via HDMI)
RS-232 control port
BD-Live and BonusVIEW support
IEC AC power cord socket
Fully backlit IR remote control
Direct access Web Apps for: YouTube; Picasa
Latest Marvell Qdeo Kyoto-G2H video processor
Anagram 24/192 upsampling for all 10 analog channels
Specifications
Power Requirements: 100-240 (VAC); 50 or 60 (Hz)
Power Consumption: Standby – 0.5 (watt, economy mode);
operating – 35 (watts)
Frequency response: not specified
Dynamic range: not specified
Signal-to-noise ratio: better than -108 dB (unspecified conditions)
Channel separation: better than -100 dB @ 1000 Hz (unspecified
conditions)
THD+Noise: less than 0.003% @ 1,000 Hz
Designed in: UK
Assembled in: China
Warranty: 3 years
Dimensions (WxDxH) – 16.9 x 12.3 x 3.3 (inch)
Weight – 11.0 lbs
MSRP – $1,299
Manufactured By:
Audio Partnership Plc
Cambridge Audio
Gallery Court
Hankey Place
London SE1 4BB
United Kingdom
Web site: www.cambridgeaudio.com
US Distributor:
Audio Plus Services
156 Lawrence Paquette Ind Drive
Champlain, New York 12919
Phone: 800 663 9352
Web site: www.audioplusservices.com
WidescreenReview.com • Issue 175 • March 2013
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