The Pioneer BDP-LX 52 is a Blu-ray player released in autumn 2009, and currently sells for around 500 GBP online.

Florian Friedrich, tested on December 10, 2009

Superb HD-film picture.
Above-average DVD playback.
Loads of picture controls.
Versatile HD-audio output.
Effective jitter reduction in combination with Pioneer receivers.

Audible fan noise.
Loading times are way too long.

There’s no question about it: Pioneer devices almost unfailingly produce top-quality pictures. On top of that, the BDP-LX 52 also sounds fantastic: Pioneer’s PQLS technology improves differentiation in HD-audio formats — although only if you use the player with a recent Pioneer receiver. On the down side, as with the earlier Pioneer BDP-320, the disc-loading times are almost unbearably long.

Now that the souped-up LX 52 has found its way into the test lab, our first impression was that the two devices look extremely similar. But closer inspection reveals two main differences: Firstly, the BDP-LX52 costs a good 150 GBP more than the BDP-320. Secondly, it uses more expensive-looking materials — in particular the robust aluminium front panel.

Multimedia

The RS-232 interface allows you to control the Pioneer remotely, for example, so that you can automate your home cinema.

Pioneer’s new mid-range player supports BD-Live and has one gigabyte of internal memory, so you won’t need to attach a USB stick in order to store downloaded content. Playback of JPEG photos, MP3 music files, and AVCHD or DivX videos is only possible if you first burn the files to a DVD. High-resolution photos show accurate scaling, but the slideshow function doesn’t allow you to select one of your files to play as background music. We’re also disappointed by the lack of YouTube access — we would have liked to see such capabilities at this price, especially since they’ve long been present in significantly cheaper players such as the LG BD 370 and the Panasonic DMP-BD 60.

Other Features

The Pioneer displays information about the current signal — video/audio codecs, bitrate — at the touch of a button.

The user can store the values for the sensational 12 video controls — which include noise filters, “Gamma Correction”, “Hue”, and “Detail”, for example — in three different memory locations. Adjustment junkies will particularly love the optional “Pure Cinema” mode, which can be an invaluable tool for picture optimisation: When set correctly, it conjures up flicker-free, progressive images from almost all Blu-rays and DVDs. To access this picture-enhancement mode, you simply have to press the remote control’s “Video Adjust” button.

Operation

As sleek as the player itself, the remote control allows the user to switch between output resolutions during playback.

Disc-loading times are extremely slow: Some discs take as long as 105 seconds — a small eternity — to be ready for playback. Incidentally, long loading times turn out not to be a question of price: The 4,500-GBP high-end Denon DVD-A1 UD from Denon, for example, is even slower. Although the Pioneer’s drive runs extremely quietly, you can’t say the same about the cooling fan: Users with sensitive hearing will find the light but constant noise irritating in quiet film scenes.

Picture Quality

Blu-ray:

Perfect: the BDP-LX 52’s frequency response.

The BDP-320 already impressed with its perfect playback of Blu-ray films, so it would have been pretty surprising if the BDP-LX 52 showed errors in this discipline — and what do you know, the player outputs flawless HDMI pictures. All digital greyscale levels match perfectly, and the player displays whiter-than-white and blacker-than-black content in all three colour-space selections. The digital brightness and colour values on Blu-rays therefore output exactly how they’re stored on the disc.

If you’re the type that can’t live without fine-tuning controls for your picture, you’ll definitely get your fill with the LX 52: Numerous settings allow you, for example, to compensate for any weaknesses in your projector or projector screen. Particularly handy is the finely adjustable gamma setting, which even many displays or older home-cinema projectors don’t even offer.

In an especially tricky test scene, recorded at 30 frames per second, the Pioneer performs perfectly: The girl’s eyelashes look impressively sharp and suffer no flicker when the “Pure Cinema” mode is set to “On”. Comb effects appear during sideways motion in HDTV material at 50 or 60 frames per second, but these disappear if you switch to “Auto 1” or “Auto 2”.

DVD:
If the DVD you’re watching has a progressive flag, which most discs do, the BDP-LX 52 impresses with flicker-free, beautifully sharp pictures. Even TV recordings convert accurately to 1080p format, showing clean, smooth edges. If the DVD lacks a progressive flag, you should switch the “Pure Cinema” mode to “On”. Only then did our test DVD “Six Days Seven Nights” play back entirely without flicker. But in the scenes where the pilot stands next to the vertical propeller blade of a plane, Pioneer high-end’s Pioneer BDP-LX 91, for example, delivers better scaling. What’s more, the BDP-LX 52’s resolution list lacks the 720p HDTV format, which older projectors, for example, will expect.

Sound Quality

Also flawless: the LX 52’s audio frequency response.

To turn on the PCM multichannel output, as well as the PQLS function (“Precision Quartz Clock System”; only works with Pioneer receivers), the user has to activate the “Kuro Link” setting in the setup navigator. The “PQLS 2ch Audio” setting improves CD sound; “PQLS Multi Surround” peps up the sound from discs recorded with linear, PCM multichannel sound. With this technology active, the Nine Inch Nails classic “The Hand That Feeds”, in Dolby TrueHD, sounds less aggressive, roomier, and more finely differentiated. In practice, however, there’s no audible difference between the BDP-LX 52’s sound and that of a Blu-ray player outputting bitstream audio via HDMI (at the same volume level).