The Sony BDP-S 5000 ES is a high-end Blu-ray player, available since summer 2008. Not only the looks make a big impression - rivaling the bulky dimensions, the price tag of 1,200 GBP will have many buyers thinking twice.

• Excellent HDTV, with 24p support and video controls.
• HD audio as a bitstream.
• BD-Live support.
• HD decoder for analog 7.1-channel audio.

• Imperfections in DVD de-interlacing.
• No decoding of DTS-HD into PCM via HDMI.
• No MP3 playback.

The BDP-S 5000 ES is an impressive, high-end device - only the DVD playback leaves room for improvement. The Blu-ray picture quality nears perfection, and the analog CD sound falls nothing short of superb. Versatile image-enhancement options tease an extra touch of detail out of many discs.

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Introduction

For three decades, Sony's abbreviation "ES" ("Extremely High Standard") has adorned high-quality CD and SACD players for discerning music fans. The series stood out with excellent choice of components, the highest technical standards, and durable chassis construction.

Now, for the first time, a Blu-ray player will continue the traditions of the ES series, at the proud price of 1,200 GBP. The new BDP-S 5000 ES profits from Sony's collective decades of experience in providing first-rate audio.

This 9-kilogram behemoth contains only the best components, and the device can output all HD-audio formats as analog signals via gold-plated cinch outputs. And, so that the HDTV picture also meets the most stringent requirements, Sony employs new 14-bit video technology along with other sophisticated digital wizardry.

Features and Operation

Well thought-out: The most important buttons on the remote glow blue, simplifying operation in the dark, home-theater environment.

Sony builds these players in Japan, with 1.6-millimeter-thick, metal casings, and with the high-precision disc drive positioned in the center of the unit. An extremely rigid frame protects the laser from vibrations, and the device tracks the laser's position in order to balance out non-uniformities in the disc's rotation. This ensures that the data-stream suffers as few errors as possible, right from the beginning.

Sony assembled the player's decoding circuitry, transformer, and video and audio processing separately to avoid mutual interference. The newly commissioned "Precision Clock Conditioner" reduces jitter (see Audio technology in detail).

At the heart of the player is the new processor, the CXD 0057GF. As with Sony's BDP-S 550, this model has offers four types of video controller, a 6-band gamma correction, and three noise filters. New image-enhancement features include the "HD Reality Enhancer" and "Super Bit Mapping" functions (see Video technology in detail).

Menu Navigation:

Familiar: The "XMB" menu system is quickly becoming the norm for Sony, but we find it a little confusing in places.

Like most recent Sony devices, the 5000 ES's menu apes the PlayStation 3's rolling-list concept. This makes navigation swift, but means some menu entries are hidden and unclear. For example, we found it hard to set up our desired audio output; it's not obvious from the menu that the player can only decode DTS-HD sound in analog format. If you try to output DTS-HD as PCM, multichannel sound via HDMI, the player produces only 5.1 - instead of 7.1 - channels. If you want 7.1-channel PCM via HDMI, the Sony will only output Dolby Digital Plus and TrueHD.

Video Settings:
The video settings were a bit easier to get to grips with. If the automatic HDMI setup fails, you can manually enforce all varieties of HDMI color space, all HDMI resolutions, and 24p playback.

Of course, the device can play Picture-in-Picture tracks, and derives BD-Live content via its Internet connection. Thanks to the supplied, 1-gigabyte, removable storage-media, playback of additional video clips from the Internet works straight-off - of course, however, it takes some time to download higher-resolution videos.

The 5000 ES will not accept MP3 music files, but does display photos and AVCHD videos in top HDTV-quality. The "Quick Start" function slashes the loading time from 25 to just 7 seconds, but increases the standby power consumption to almost 19 watts.

Picture Quality

Excellent: The HDTV frequency profile shows full contrast and no level drop-off.

Blu-ray:
Tests have shown that HDTV playback quality differs very little from on Blu-ray player to another. So, it's no surprise that the BDP-S 5000 ES's Blu-ray picture is virtually identical to that of the smaller BDP-S 550 - on first glance, at least. All the digital HDMI levels meet the ideal values almost perfectly, and de-interlacing revealed no weaknesses.

The problems that the BDP-S 550 suffered when playing the HQV test-disc did not occur with the new model, which showed the "spinning bar" test-pattern (recorded with 60 motion phases) crisply and with no flicker.

The 5000 ES put in a prime performance even with the challenging sequences from another test-disc in which cars are seen moving quickly through the picture - the number plates remained easily legible throughout. Traces of the HDTV line-structure are only visible as minimal flicker, and only in rare cases. During the test, for example, we saw this effect in finely-branched tree tops moving through the picture from bottom to top.

The BDP-S 5000 ES always reproduces 24-fps movies, recorded in both 1080/60p and 1080/24p, as flicker-free progressive pictures - this ability is now standard for modern Blu-ray players.

On closer inspection, however, you do notice some differences from other players. With "Super Bit Mapping" activated, the picture looks finer and more natural. Especially in scenes showing a lot of sky, with smooth variation from dark to light, the BDP-S 5000 ES produces smoother transitions. The effect is subtle, but helps to produce a more cinematic mood and a less ‘digital-looking' picture. This is most obvious in animated movies such as "Ratatouille", where no noise or graininess disturbs the digital color gradients.

That said, the Sony handles film-grain well, for example, in the superhero adventure movie "Iron Man", where a light grain is present throughout. The integrated image-enhancer - set to FGR ("Film Grain Reduction") level 1 - does some excellent work: In the scene just before Tony Stark's private jet takes off, the green grass and blue sky look softer and more authentic, without sacrificing fine-detail differentiation.

The "Enhance" option in the HD Reality Enhancer menu, on the other hand, brings out fine surface-structures. This is very useful in noise-free animation sequences or with high-definition photo playback, but will exaggerate any highly visible film grain - a good example is the American Revolution drama "The Patriot". In such cases, you should turn the picture's sharpness down slightly and increase the film grain reduction accordingly.

DVD:
Despite having the most up-to-date video processing, the 5000 ES displays movie DVDs that lack progressive flags poorly. An unstable flicker accompanies the camera pan across the beach in "Six Days Seven Nights" - hardly what you'd expect of a high-end player.

Of course, Sony is capable of producing intelligent de-interlacing, as we know from the PlayStation 3. Where the progressive flag is set correctly, the S 5000 ES produces a perfectly de-interlaced picture, but that's likely to be a lukewarm consolation for anyone with a large DVD collection.

Video Technology in Detail

With and without SBM: With SBM active (left), grayscale- and color-gradients are free of unpleasant false-edges, giving more natural-looking color blends.

The Sony's LSI (Large Scale Integration) chip processes the de-interlaced 10-bit signals only after the "Precise Clock Conditioner" (see Audio technology in detail) has provided them with a high-precision clock frequency. Two circuits are responsible for pixel-perfect image analysis and HD picture tuning, while two further circuits handle video filtering and film-grain reduction (FGR). The "HD Reality Enhancer" continually analyzes the picture to a high degree of accuracy, and sharpens fine details or smoothes out noise produced by film-grain.

The Chroma Upsampling stage and Super Bit Mapping module work to produce a natural display of color and grayscale gradients, by breaking down the digital banding and smoothing edges. This is supposed to work even in twelve-, ten-, or eight-bit output if the player has to adapt its 14-bit signal for a lower-quality display. The trick: A fine, high-frequency noise is superimposed on the grayscale or color signal ("noise shaping") and eliminates the fine false-edges.

At a short viewing distance and with careful observation, we were also able to demonstrate the effect clearly in the test room with test-patterns such as the "stepped gray" image: Here, we saw delicate vertical edges without Super Bit Mapping, which, when turned on, caused the false-edges to disappear.

In the lab, we also produced digitally captured HDMI screenshots that provided evidence of this effect (see picture). Sony originally developed Super Bit Mapping in the 90s as an audio-enhancement system for CD mastering. As the mastering process converted 20-bit masters of digital-audio recordings to the CD's 16-bit format, SBM modulated them with a digital noise.

Sound Quality

Rich connectivity: Sony's new Blu-ray player has a wealth of high-quality, gold-plated connections for outputting both digital and analog signals.

The BDP-S 5000 ES outputs all audio formats, including DTS-HD, via its cinch outputs, meaning analog interfaces will experience a renaissance with this unit. Long HDMI cables can cause jitter problems with digital sound, but players with high-quality decoders can get round simply this by converting the digital sound into analog.

The first test used Diana Krall's CD "The Look of Love", which we fed into an Onkyo TX-SR 806 receiver in both analog (via stereo cinch) and digital (via HDMI) forms. With deeper depth-differentiation and clearer vocals, the analog output won by a small margin. Even CD audio transmitted to the Onkyo via the optical interface failed to match the roominess of the analog sound. This result might not be as clear-cut with other cables or receivers.

In the test comparison between digital and analog 7.1-channel DTS-HD, from the Blu-ray version of "Jumper", the Sony's full speaker-setup options proved their worth. These allow the user to set up exactly tailored levels and delays. Unlike with stereo CD sound, we couldn't pick out any audible differences between digital and analog signals. Every time, the 7.1-channel mix sounded massively dynamic and detail-rich. For both signal types, the 5000 ES's sound brings real advantages over entry-level players.

Sadly, direct comparison of analog and digital is not possible, as the player cannot output multichannel audio via HDMI and analog simultaneously. In any case, we recommend experimenting with your own particular AV receiver to work out which connection sounds better.

Audio Technology in Detail

In an HDMI transmission, the audio data stream travels within a TMDS signal (Transition Minimized Differential Signaling), which runs at a very high clock frequency. Since the audio clock frequency derives from splitting the picture's pixel clock frequency, inaccurate HDMI data (HDMI clock jitter) can also have negative effects on the audio quality - this produces the so-called jitter.

To combat this, Sony is now using "Precision Clock Conditioner" for the first time in the consumer sector. This technology reduces the amount of clock impurities in the video signal even before it feeds it into the HDMI transmitter. All formats transmitted via HDMI benefit from this, as do - indirectly - even the S/PDIF interfaces. In terms of measurements, the Sony player impressed with low jitter on the coaxial cinch output, and scored even better values via the optical TOSLINK output.

A look under the hood shows how much effort Sony has put into the player's analog audio technology. All the analog outputs are on a separate circuit board with discrete, symmetrical circuit construction (upper mid section), and their own power-supply transformer. Alongside the Burr Brown PCM 1786 D-A converters, there are also high-quality operational amplifiers and a jitter-reduction circuit.