SONY UBP-X700 Ultra-HD Blu-ray player
In addition to a nice price for a UHD Blu-ray player, this Sony piles on handy network and streaming extras.
In addition to a nice price for a UHD Blu-ray player, this Sony piles on networking & streaming extras.
Just a few months ago we took a close look at Sony’s UBP-X800 Ultra-HD Blu-ray player, which was generally pretty impressive. But step down a model to the UBP-X700 and you’ll save a useful $150, while finding surprisingly little has been omitted.
Equipment
With regard to features, that is. Physically, some 2.4 kilograms of mass has been omitted from this device, along with a fair few cubic centimetres of volume. It’s a 320mm-wide unit, rather than the standard 430mm component width. And quite thin and not especially deep. We’ve become used to entry-level components, and sources in particular, arriving in non-standard widths, and of course many amplifier, DACs and other gear can come in compact packages too. If you have a stack of equipment that you’d like to remain consistent, then step back up to the X800. If that doesn’t matter to you, the X700 will probably do the trick.
There seem to be three actual feature omissions. First, this player doesn’t support Bluetooth (and consequently not Sony’s high-quality LDAC codec). Nor does it support Sony’s DSEE-HX audio upscaling system, which purports to add missing high frequencies to lossily compressed content. And, puzzlingly, the player is not ‘Certified Hi-Res Audio’. I shall return to why we’re puzzled by that. But first, let’s see what it does do. The rest of what the player does is pretty much identical to the X800. It spins discs and outputs their audio and video via HDMI. Those discs can be DVDs or CDs or Blu-ray discs, along with their various recordable versions. The support extends to 3D Blu-ray and, of course, to Ultra-HD Blu-ray, the discs that can deliver Ultra-HD (aka 4K) content along with the additional benefits the format offers.
The playback here even extends to SACD. Just as vinyl is making a comeback, Sony seems to be helping SACD to also make somewhat of a comeback by including SACD support in many of its players (including even its $229 BDP-S6700 Blu-ray player).
The player also has extensive network functionality, including things like Netflix, YouTube and ABC and SBS catch-up services, along with DLNA renderer and player support. (I dig deeply into that stuff below.)
Network connectivity is via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. The player only recognised my 2.4GHz Wi-Fi access points, not the 5GHz one, confirming single-band specification.
Output is via two HDMI outputs and coaxial digital audio. Only one of the HDMI outputs delivers real video. The other is for supplying audio to external audio equipment that may not be compatible with UHD signals, such as an older AV receiver.
Power is supplied by an external computer-style power brick. The remote control is a standard stubby Sony model. Despite the size and the relatively limited number of keys, it did the job perfectly well.
We received the UDP-X700 for review with the Sony STR-DH790 AV receiver, which we covered last issue (see panel above). As mentioned then, there are complementaries to using them together, and such synergies will be still further extended if you’re pairing these with a Sony TV, thanks to Bravia Sync control.
But with the abilities outlined above, this Sony UHD Blu-ray player can be paired with other brands of kit. I used this player with home theatre receivers from Sony, Yamaha and Marantz, and it worked very nicely with the HDMI Consumer Electronics Control capabilities of all three, along with an LG OLED TV.
Disc playing
The transport control is quite competent. Even on UHD Blu-ray there are three fast-forwards and three fast-rewind speeds, one forwards slow motion speed, plus forwards stepping frame by frame. With standard Blu-ray discs and DVDs, you can also go slow motion in reverse and frame-by-frame step in reverse.
The only disappointing thing in this regard was that the player didn’t retain any information about where it was on the disc, so in many cases it would begin from the beginning again if it had been stopped. Though that didn’t matter for UHD Blu-ray discs — every single one of the 50 or so UHD Blu-rays I’ve checked out so far includes a ‘Resume’ feature on the disc itself, so that you can return to where you left off. A small number of Blu-rays also have this. DVDs don’t.
It’s an odd omission not only because many other players do this without issue (I’ve been spoiled by my Oppo player) — but also considering that the very first DVD player I purchased was the Sony DVP-S725D, and that had just such a memory built in. And that must have been close to 20 years ago.
The 576i/50 and 1080i/50 deinterlacing were both quite good, if not perfect. Failure to correctly detect film source content seemed to be much the same as for the X800. There is no setting to change how deinterlacing is handled. And here’s a curious thing — feeding the exact same 576i/50 film clips to the player via the network, rather than playing them from DVD, resulted in very different behaviour. In effect, the player was locked into film-source mode for those. So video-sourced film clips had heavy combing throughout. If your DVD collection resides on a server instead of on silver discs, then you ought to get superb performance from most movies (except for those in which the odd and even frames have been misaligned), but may have problems with some TV shows.
As I write (in May 2018) the player does not support Dolby Vision, although a footnote on the Sony website says that this will be added ‘via firmware update in 2018 summer’. The only Dolby Vision material I yet have is the Westworld Series One UHD Blu-ray package which we reviewed last
issue. Using this player at this time results in the signal being handled as HDR. Presumably the additional capabilities of Dolby Vision are simply stripped out. The results aren’t bad, but things like colour graduations on the human face didn’t seem quite as smooth as with a Dolby Vision-capable player. Of course, that ought to go away with that firmware upgrade.
As for all my other UHD Blu-rays, which generally use HDR and the BT.2020 colour space, the performance was indistinguishable from my Oppo BDP-203 player. Harry Potter DTS:X soundtracks were properly delivered to the home theatre receiver, as was the Dolby Atmos audio from a dozen other discs.
One key on the remote is particularly worth mentioning. If you like to know stuff about the content that’s playing, hit the ‘Display’ key on the bottom right of the remote. It shows interesting information about the content, including both the audio and video bit-rates. Good stuff for nerds (i.e. us!).
I was pleased to find, as mentioned, that the unit supports playback of SACDs. By default it output the audio over HDMI converted to PCM format: 5.1 channels with 176.4kHz sampling. (I presume 24 bits of resolution, but receivers typically don’t report that, so I couldn’t say for certain.) You can go into the Audio settings and change the DSD output mode to ‘Auto’. Using a receiver which supports DSD input, that’s what it delivered. For those with suitable decoding equipment and a preference for avoiding PCM along the way, that’s ideal.
Network functionality
Above I said that the player is not ‘Certified Hi-Res Audio’ and that I was puzzled by this. That’s because although it isn’t so certified (by Sony, presumably, or JEITA, the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association which set its requirements in a 2014 announcement), it certainly does handle high resolution audio. As I write this paragraph, Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers’ 1962 album ‘Mosaic’ is playing. The high resolution audio — 24 bit/192kHz sampling — is on my network server. I’m using BubbleUPnP on an Android tablet to send the music to the X700. It is decoding it to PCM and sending the music to a Marantz SR8012 home theatre receiver. The receiver reports that it is receiving a stereo signal in PCM format with 192kHz sampling.
If that’s not high resolution, I don’t know what is.
The music format support is also broad, including Monkey’s Audio (Sony’s website calls it Mokey’s Audio), DSD, OGG Vorbis, WMA, AAC and Apple Lossless. Also DSD, but only via USB, not via the network. It’s odd that Sony doesn’t permit this (it was the same with the X800).
You can stream video and photos via DLNA. Will your video stream work? Some of mine did; others didn’t, and I couldn’t work out why. They certainly generally work in TVs. But the ones that did included UltraHD clips employing the H.264 and H.265 codecs. Rather to my surprise my 100Mbps UHD test clip streamed almost without interruption. Usually with 100Mbps connections it pauses and stutters. It did with the X700 too, but only after 30 seconds or so.
With the Wi-Fi network connection, the same clip ran perfectly smoothly, despite it being limited to only the 2.4GHz band. How well that works in your home will depend on things like distance from the router and amount of Wi-Fi traffic in your space.
Photos worked very nicely, with them being scaled directly to UHD output. Full colour resolution (i.e. 4:4:4) was delivered, so they were about as good as they could get.
The player also supports what it calls ‘Mirror share’ which is Miracast compatible. I was able to cast my Huawei phone’s videos directly to the Sony.
What else? Spotify Connect, YouTube, MUBI (subscription, curated movies), Netflix, Foxtel Play, iView and SBS On Demand, plus a couple of American sports streaming apps, are provided. Netflix and Spotify worked very nicely. I especially liked that the ‘Display’ key on the remote worked with Netflix, so I could pop up the connection status at any time.
Conclusion
The Sony UBP-X700 really is a full-featured UHD Blu-ray player (or soon will be when Dolby Vision is added in the promised update) at a very reasonable price. Stephen Dawson