Sony BDV-E500W Review

   
    Sony's BDV-E500W  takes a decidedly more high-end approach, offering Blu-ray playback in a 5.1 home-theater-in-a-box (HTIB) system, with step-ups like tall-boy front speakers and wireless rear speakers. Like many Sony products, the BDV-E500W exudes style, from the glossy black speakers to the glass-like front panel of the main receiver unit.

    The Sony BDV-E500W consists of the 5.1 speaker package with an AV receiver with a built-in Blu-ray player. The front speakers have a "tall-boy" design, measuring 48.9 inches high with plastic cabinets that certainly don't feel high-end to the touch, but look stylish from afar. Peak behind the speaker grille and you can see it's a two-way design, with a 0.8-inch tweeter and 2.6-inch woofer. The rear speakers are come in at 8.9 inches tall and feature a more modest matte black finish. Rounding out the speaker package is the sub-woofer and a modestly-size center channel speaker.

    Like many Sony products, the BDV-E500W features a version of the XMB graphical user interface. We're fans of the layout; it's visually appealing and once you get accustomed to the logic of the menus, it's easy to navigate.The included remote features a solid button layout and is easy to use, if you're able to overlook its one bothersome flaw--there's no eject button for the Blu-ray player. That's not a unique flaw of the BDV-E500W, as all 2009 Sony home theater products we've seen have lacked a simple eject button.

    It's "Easy Setup" program takes you through a series of onscreen menus, where you're presented with various options. It's pretty straightforward stuff: Menu Language, TV Type, TV Connection Method, and so on.It's simply a matter of plugging-in the supplied microphone into the receiver/Blu-ray player's rear panel mic jack. Initiating auto setup runs a series of test tones through all the speakers and subwoofer. A minute or so later the BDV-E500W will have adjusted the volume levels of the speakers and sub; and adjusted the delays for all the speakers and subwoofer.

    Many people criticized previous generations of Sony HTIBs for their lack of bass and treble controls, but the BDV-E500W has them. True, the tone controls are buried in the setup menus, but at least they're there. The "Night" mode, also easily accessible via the remote compresses soft-to-loud dynamic range for late night movie sessions. It worked reasonably well.

    I have tested some DVD's to catch the audio quality of it and some times it is lackluster and lacks the excitement of seeing a blu-ray movie. I used the "Quantum of Solace" Blu-ray to test the BDV-E500W's home theater competency. It had no trouble playing the opening car chase sequence at a fairly loud volume, but the sound lacked excitement. It was muffled and lackluster, so James Bond's (Daniel Craig) gunplay didn't punctuate the actionas anyone wishes.

    Neil Young's "Red Rocks Live" DVD sounded clear, at least with the acoustic tunes, like "Razor Love" which was gorgeous. The wrap-around surround mix of crowd applause was enveloping. But the harder rocking electric tunes sounded more abrasive than good. On the upside, the wireless surround speakers never called attention to themselves. No pops, static, or dropouts, the wireless speakers sounded like wired speakers. Nice.

   Turning down the volume to a more moderate level helped restore the BDV-E500W's composure, and we thought the film's quieter scenes actually sounded pretty nice. The BDV-E500W's subwoofer is capable of delivering fairly deep bass, but it's muddy and thick sounding bass. The sub's presence made its way up through the midrange, so dialog was overly warm and full sounding.

    While the DVD players included with HTIBs generally have disappointing image quality, it's much less of an issue with Blu-ray systems. Even entry-level Blu-ray players look excellent, and the differences between players are much smaller than with DVD. That being said, there are some performance differences between players, so we put the BDV-E500W through our Blu-ray test suite.

    First, we took a look at HQV's HD Benchmark test suite on Blu-ray. Most Blu-ray content is film-based, so we started off with the Film Resolution Test, the BDV-E500W aced the test showing all the detail of Blu-ray without any strobing effects. Next up where a pair of video-based jaggies tests, and the Sony performed well on these as well, with virtually no jaggies on either the rotating white line or three pivoting lines. Last up was the Video Resolution Loss Test and here the BDV-E500W stumbled a bit, as the most detailed part of the test pattern suffered from strobe-like artifacts.

    It needs improvement in some departments like the quality of the bass and the designing of the system is the key here.I hope that Sony would make a better effort on improving the systems in future.

    My Rating: 2.7/5