back to article Cambridge Audio Azur 751BD 3D Blu-ray player

There’s a renaissance in audiophile grade Blu-ray players happening at the moment. Arcam’s exotic BDP100 got the ball rolling, and now the Oppo BDP-95EU, Marantz UD7006 and this here Cambridge Audio Azur 751BD are hot on its heels. 

I must confess to being excited. While I like cheap-as-chips electronics as much as the next guy …

COMMENTS

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "A good sign as rigidity usually begets fidelity."

    I bet you can "hear the difference" when you use gold plated phono leads too.

    On a realistic note, £800 for a blu-ray player? Sorry El Reg but we aren't all cashing in our Apple or facebook shares this week.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      WTF?

      On a realistic note, £800 for a blu-ray player

      Well done, you've read the headline and the price, then jumped to the comments section.

      You know, there are all those word things inbetween, you may want your mom to help you with.

    2. Citizen Kaned

      yeah, but....

      unlike with apple. here the components are actually of better quality. you arent 100% paying more for a name. thats why im using £2000 worth of speakers and not some £20 ones. i can hear the difference. ive worked my way up from entry level sony satellites to mordaunt short and now to B&W. same with amps. home cinema is something im interested in and i was rpepared to splash some cash on it. with a baby on the way now and married, i think i will have to make them last me :(

      growing up can get a bit boring sometimes!....

    3. Martin
      Happy

      ah, but....

      ...it's the gold-plated DIRECTIONAL audio phono cables that really make the difference between audiophile hi-fi and ordinary hi-fi.

      1. Citizen Kaned

        a title... blah

        http://usa.denon.com/us/Product/Pages/Product-Detail.aspx?Catid=5840d55c-4077-4d9e-9421-36f204fb4587&SubId=85958de8-a123-4213-8ae1-bb6afaee9a97&ProductId=f7d26b3a-05a6-4724-a5c1-2a63642a6206 or the denon $500 ethernet cable! :)

        i actually use some speaker wire that is silver core. £12 a metre. i have to say im not sure i can tell the difference! but its only a 1m centre speaker cable

  2. TheProf
    Thumb Up

    Golden ears

    Just a small point about the 'pure audio' mode. Would an audiophile have a plasma screen in the same room, never mind switched on, while listening (that's LISTENING) to music?

    1. Citizen Kaned
      Thumb Down

      eh?

      maybe you live in a mansion where you have separate rooms for listening to music, watching movies etc.

      those of us who live in the real world have most of it in our lounge. TVs are great for browsing audio from NAS box etc. i listen to music through a denon amp and B&W speakers, streamed from a NAS box. its actually much more flexible than having to use cds. and with the big screen i can also have a canvass to put imagery on.

      you do know that having a TV between 2 speakers doesnt ruin the sound, dont you?

    2. TeeCee Gold badge

      Re: Golden ears

      There's no easy answer to that one.

      I have a completely seperate aging Arcam / KEF Coda HiFi system to my Cambridge Audio / KEF 2005 surround system for a variety of reasons. The most important being that the only surround system I have heard in demo that sounded as good as the seperate HiFi setup when playing Vinyl or CD cost considerably north of 6 grand.....(!) I can replace 'em both with better kit for less than that.

      Of course I am told that having idle speakers in the same room as those doing the work is a terrible thing, but take 'em all out and I can't hear the difference, which is what's important. It's like the old speaker cable debate. I can hear the difference between "bog" 530 strand copper and my old QED Qudos stuff, but I cannot hear any difference between that and something costing 5 or 6 times as much per metre.

      So at the end of the day it's all about whether you can hear a difference. In that case I suspect that the only important factor in this case is the acreage of glass on the front acting as an unwanted reflector. However, outside of a demo room's careful acoustic construction, you'd be pushed to spot it IMHO, as that cabinet, nice wood floor or badly placed armchair in your living room will be far more of an issue. I doubt whether it's switched on or not would make an audible difference, despite what the types who dwell on the number of carats in the gold plating of their digital interconnects may tell you.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Golden Ears

        I can't see any problem with having one in the same room, as long as it was switched off. Depending on the 'standby' it might have to be switched off at the wall though.

        Yes, i'm one of those people, with a high range of hearing, who can hear the low hum or high whine of a lot of kit. A muted tv and a switched off tv sound very different, so i wouldn't want one on if i was listening to 'pure' audio... not that i do

  3. MJI Silver badge

    So it has SACD

    Does it haveDVD Audio as well?

    WHo would care about compressed music and spend that sort of money?

    1. Citizen Kaned

      good kit can help with mp3s...

      my denon isnt as good at it as my old yamaha, the yammy was excellent at rebuilding the sound of mp3 files. it was very hard to spot the difference between cd and mp3.

      of course some cds actually arent very well engineered. sometimes the mp3 actually sounds better than the original. oddly.

  4. Earl Jones Of Potatoes
    Pint

    britania

    who said that El Reg wasn't bias to things made in the united kingdom of great "Britannia".... I mean, 90% is a bloody good reason to chanting ..... Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves....

    God save our beloved Queeeeeeeeeeeeeeeen

  5. JDX Gold badge

    re: we aren't all cashing in our Apple or facebook shares this week

    It might offend you to know this, but there ARE quite a lot of rich people who buy expensive hardware. I'm sure you'd prefer they only reviewed stuff on sale in Aldi but there's a wider audience to consider.

    1. Some Beggar

      @JDX

      And it might disappoint you to learn that there are quite a lot of rich people who are also savvy enough to understand that precisely 87.64% of audiophilia is medicine show homeopathic hogwash. There's no obligation to waste money on unnecessary audiobling just because one's coin is weighing heavy in the purse. And there's nothing wrong with scoffing at unnecessary audiobling whether one can afford it or not.

      (Of course, you probably won't notice that 0.64% unless you are using palladium-coated wifis to connect to the interweb.)

  6. MJI Silver badge

    Found it - it does do DVD-A

    So it does both HD music formats

    As to speaker cable I can hear the differences between cheap and decent, but my decent cable was not that expensive, just decent quality.

    £800 seems a fair price to me - remember the first DVD players were £500 and up.

    This is full of good quality stuff.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Joke

      Re: does it do DVD-A?

      I didn't think that was a pre-requisite until the actresses got a bit old for mainstream porn!

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Down

    meh

    I hope it lasts longer than my Azur CD player. Because I hardly ever use actual CDs these days, I didn't notice until a month outside of the one year warranty, so I guess I am not SOL.

  8. spegru
    Thumb Down

    at 900 quid

    i'd expect ogg suport

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