Sony BDP-CX960 400-Disc Blu-Ray Disc Changer
Got this player to give me access to my Blu-ray collection remotely around the house through a HDMI to Cat6 distribution system. The player sits in the basement in the home theater.
I had considered ripping my Blu-rays to a hard drive but the size of memory required for even a modestly sized collection and, at this time, the inability to stream lossless audio made my choice clear. A Blu-ray changer was the way to go.
Player works very well with picture and sound on par with my Oppo Blu-ray player. I loaded about 10 discs to start and pulled in their details via Gracenotes. This worked well, taking maybe a minute per disc. I loaded the remainder and let it run overnight.
Only one disc was missing cover art (The Tourist), although it did pull in the title etc. This is a new release at the time of this review, I suspect cover art will be available shortly. One disc was wrongly identified as a duplicate of another disc in the player. Pulled it out and reinserted and the player identified it properly. No need to use the manual label function for any discs although my collection is mostly mainstream.
Searching for discs is pretty straight forward. I'd like to see more detail in the Gracenotes listing for each disc (maybe more than just the main actor plus a brief description of the movie) but I don't believe this is an issue with Sony's execution, more a limitation of Gracenotes. A rear IR input would be nice,
considering I expect a lot of owners will be using this as I have have, to distribute video around their house and hence need remote control of it. An IR flasher stuck on the front serves the same purpose even if not as elegant as a rear connection. The ES version of this player has a rear IR flasher connection and RS232 - but you pay for it.
