Why You Can Trust CNET Onkyo BD-SP807 review: Onkyo BD-SP807
The Onkyo BD-SP807 is a high-end Blu-ray player that offers excellent picture and sound quality, a sturdy design and a wealth of video and audio outputs. It's expensive and its remote control has all the visual appeal of an infected wound, but it'll almost certainly satisfy AV fanatics
You can now get a Blu-ray player for just £100 or so. You may wonder, then, why anyone would pay around £600 for the Onkyo BD-SP807. The answer, according to Onkyo, lies in the quality of its machine. The company tells us that this player does as good a job with both audio and video as it's possible to do. Onkyo also points out, quite rightly, that other companies charge a good deal more for their high-end players. Onkyo, you see, offers high-end equipment at mid-range prices, and we've most definitely been fans of its AV equipment in the past.
Onkyo BD-SP807
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Huge hunk of class
Call us sceptical but, when we see a piece of premium AV gear that's rather, well, chunky, we sometimes wonder if it's all for show. After all, if you buy something big and heavy, you feel like you're getting more for your money.
Despite that reservation, though, Onkyo's made some sensible design decisions with the BD-SP807. For example, mounting the Blu-ray drive in the middle of the machine is supposed to help ward off vibrations, which should prevent any unwanted distortion creeping into your digital signal. While we've not exactly had loads of issues with signal noise in Blu-ray players in the past, we do have to say that the BD-SP807 is exceptionally well built.
We love its appearance too, despite its size. The funky disc tray has a cool shape to it, and the player looks classy. Does any of this really matter? No. But, if you're paying £600 for a piece of kit, you want it to have visual impact, and the BD-SP807 certainly does.
Storage shenanigans
If you want to use Blu-ray's interactive features, you need some storage space to hold files in. Some players have built-in storage, and some, like the BD-SP807, have a cheeky SD-card slot, into which you have to place your own SD card if you want to use BD-Live features.
We can forgive this on a £100 player. On a £600 player, though, it makes us very cross indeed. Still, BD-Live remains a waste of time, effort and money, and you can safely ignore it.
No speed freak
The BD-SP807 managed to load our test disc, Vantage Point, in 1 minute and 9 seconds. We consider anything below 40 seconds to be fast, and anything over a minute to be slow, so the BD-SP807 doesn't earn our respect from a load-times perspective.
If speed is important to you, this might be a deal-breaker. Once a disc is loaded, however, all the menus work in a speedy and slick manner.
THX-certified
High-quality playback of movies is assured by the BD-SP807's THX certification. To get the best out of the BD-SP807, you may need to calibrate your TV with a THX demo disc, or, even better, connect this player to a THX-certified TV. That way, you should start seeing movies as the director intended. Trust us -- when it comes to movies, seeing everything on properly calibrated equipment makes a world of difference.
Remote hell
Like so many other devices we've seen recently, the BD-SP807 has a remote control with all the visual appeal of an infected wound. It's massive, ugly and doesn't suit a player that costs £600. It also bears a striking similarity to the equally detestable remote controls that Toshiba supplies with its Blu-ray players. Onkyo and Toshiba have always enjoyed a close relationship, and we can't help but wonder if parts of this player are based on Toshiba's technology.
Spot-on picture and sound quality
Paired with the high-end Panasonic Viera TX-P50G20B plasma TV, the BD-SP807 produced fantastic picture quality. Casino Royale was a feast for our eyes, and the first scene, shot in black and white, looked nothing short of brilliant. The deliberate grain in this scene looked natural. It was neither excessively corrected or left to go wild.
The machine's audio quality is excellent too. At the most basic level, the stereo downmix is excellent, with enough detail to make speech clear and easy to hear. You'll see massive improvements if you connect this player, via HDMI, to a decent AV receiver and speakers, though. When you do that, you'll hear lossless soundtracks as the director intended, and, depending on your speaker set-up, you're quite likely to hear detail you didn't even notice at the cinema. It's certainly well worth investing in your sound system, because, without a decent set-up, you'll miss half of what makes Blu-ray great.
Output delight
The BD-SP807 offers plenty of outputs to keep socket fanboys happy. You get 7.1 analogue audio outputs, for connecting the BD-SP807 to receivers not capable of dealing with HDMI audio or lossless codecs. You also get gold-plated terminals, both coaxial and optical digital outputs, and component and composite video outputs. Most people should be happy with these connections, and there aren't many more options that Onkyo could have thrown in.
Conclusion
We like the Onkyo BD-SP807 a great deal. Pair it with a decent amp and a great TV, and you're in for a massive treat. We also love the fact that it has a wealth of high-quality video and audio outputs. That said, we're rather disappointed that the player doesn't load discs faster. We also think that, given the machine's price, Onkyo should have jolly well included some built-in storage.
Edited by Charles Kloet