THX Caught With Pants Down Over Lexicon Blu-ray Player

SchlimpyChicken writes "Lexicon and THX apparently attempted to pull a fast one on the consumer electronics industry, but got caught this week when a couple websites exposed the fact that the high-end electronics company put a nearly-unmodified $500 Oppo Blu-ray player into a new Lexicon chassis and was selling it for $3500. AV Rant broke the story first on its home theater podcast with some pics of the two players' internals. Audioholics.com then posted a full suite of pics and tested the players with an Audio Precision analyzer. Both showed identical analogue audio performance and both failed a couple of basic THX specifications. Audioholics also posted commentary from THX on the matter and noted that both companies appear to be in a mad scramble to hide the fact that the player was ever deemed THX certified."

Comments

Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Entropy98]

Expensive isn't always better. Ever heard of Denon's $500 ‘Audiophile’ Ethernet Cable

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[imsabbel]

I tell you, audiophiles have NO IDEA OF SCALE.

I am working with HF stuff. I run on cables that cost as much as that one, but in bulk supply from industry vendors (Huber+Suhner, for example). Because they are linear to 18 Ghz.

I also did an experiment where i had to synchronize two signals to some picoseconds, and that is damn hard. Damn hard in the sense of "a day of quality time with a network analyser and a few delaylines".

---

Speaking again on HDMI: Yeah, it matters for it, as its fucking running at several hundred times the datarate than an audio connection.
HDMI is specified to transport up to 10Gbits/s, multiplexed on only 19 conductors.
Compare again with audio datarates...

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[gowen]

Please do the calculation and tell us what the difference in transit times is for, say, 40m of cable.
Clue: do actually believe that a band who's musicians use different length guitar/mic cables cannot possibly play in time?

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[commodore64_love]

(shines ethernet cable)
(attaches fake Denon label)

I've got some amazing Denon wire here, personally spit-polished to ensure the absolute best in digital transmission quality. And at only $249 this is a real bargain! (audiophiles stampede into the room). My god. It's almost like being Timothy Geitner - I'm printing my own money.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[jgardia]

sorry, but the maximum speed of i2c is 3.4 mbps. you will need about 9m difference in length to have 10% of phase difference between your clock and your data, using the maximum speed (the usual one is 100-400 kbps). I agree that cat5(e) was not designed for i2c signals, but is more than enough for this application.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Ethernet signals travel at a very large fraction of the speed of light. Light travels around 11 inches in a nanosecond. So you're claiming picosecond intolerances in your clock signals.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Taimoor]

I'm laughing my ass off. You don't seriously think the jitter caused by that miniscule difference in cable length will fool with anything designed to use twisted pair as an interconnect, do you?

We're not talking about memory busses running at several GHz, we're talking about relatively low-bandwidth interconnects between devices. And this is assuming that you're not encapsulating everything and just using ethernet signaling like everyone else in the pro audio world does.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[MattskEE]

At 20kHz two chunks of aluminum makes for a pretty nice cable. With 50GHz coax you need tiny precision machined connectors (2.4mm), and a very narrow cable with a low permittivity dielectric. Such a cable costs about $2,000.

The reason for the precision, size, and expense at those frequencies (as you know but others probably don't) is that if you have a large cable, there are multiple different wave equation solutions (modes) which allow power of a particular frequency to travel down a cable, and they will propagate at different speeds in the cable (and different attenuations), so what you get out of the cable is a distorted version of the input. So you must make the cable with size on the order of the smallest wavelength you intend to transmit. And it has to be precisely made because imperfections, scratches, and so on need to be even smaller or they will cause an impedance shift which reflects some signal back at the source.

At 50Ghz a wavelength is 6mm. At 20kHz it is 15km. This is why it is easy to make very nice audio cables, and hard to make nice HF cables.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[SchlimpyChicken]

I have been told (directly, not third party) by one of the highest authorities at Denon Electronics that their cable is a shielded Cat5e cable... They only made it to satisfy custom installers who wanted something ridiculous to sell clients who had more money than sense. Off the record of course...

In this case Denon aren't bad guys, they just aren't stupid. They had enough requests and knew these guys would simply go elsewhere to get what they wanted (another product they could sell people who, if they dropped a $100 bill on the ground, would think it a waste of time to stoop over and pick it up).

In this case, the people at fault are the installers who can't seem to charge for their time and instead want to cultivate an industry where their services are "free" and everything is paid through them buying products at cost and selling them at retail to clients. The really big installers know how to run a business, but the middle and lower tiers are largely fueling customer ignorance of the value of their services.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[ultranova]

Just because you can't measure it doesn't mean that an audiophile can't hear it.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[maestroX]

I'm curious: can you hear the difference when using unequal cable lengths?

Yes.
It is common knowledge that the human body is not built symmetrically and distance between ear and brain vary from one another.
I usually tug along my portable CAT scanner for adjusting the cable lengths properly and provide my customers with the best aural experience possible.

Re:Audio/Videophiles Beware

[Schaffner]

Well, it was Grace Hopper and she's the mother of COBOL, not FORTRAN. She used to give out "nanoseconds" at her lectures. They were 11.9 inch lengths of wire, which represents how far electricity can go in a nanosecond. A friend of mine still has one of these "nanoseconds" he got from her.

had a similar case with B&O and Panasonic

[Anonymous Coward]

When I was working for a Bang & Olufsen dealer I we had the case of a broken TV we had to pick up from a client and fix it. The TV in question was a rebadged panasonic with a nice B & O frame. We repaired the tv in the workshop and tested it. After that we put it back in its B&O frame and returned it to the customer only to find it wasn't working. Why? One of us had managed to accidently press the original panasonic powerbutton while putting it back in the B&O frame. Try explaining that to a customer.

THX?

[JustOK]

Wow. I'm sticking with THC.

Re:No shock

[Sycraft-fu]

I've never understood why you'd want to buy a "high end" Blu-ray player anyhow. Reason is I can see only two setups:

1) You own a low end TV and receiver, or maybe no receiver at all. You've got no digital inputs. Thus your Blu-ray player's DACs have to handle the conversion. However, their quality matters little. Why? Well you've got a low end setup. You clearly are not concerned with quality. As such a cheap player will do fine. Improvements to its DACs and supporting analogue circuitry won't be noticeable to you.

2) You own a high end TV/receiver and care a great deal about quality. In the case you hook the Blu-ray player up using HDMI. Reason is HDMI gives you the best signal. However in this case, the player isn't doing anything other than nabbing the data and passing it along. The analogue conversion happens in other units. So again, the quality isn't important. Your receiver's high quality DACs will handle the audio, the Blu-ray player will just send them data.

I just can't see the case where you'd need good analogue outputs for Blu-ray.

I can see potentially buying something like the Oppo player, if it had a good warranty and build quality. Makes sense to maybe pay more to have your gear last, but I can't see paying more for one just because it supposedly had better circuitry. Even if it does, you aren't going to make use of it. You'd be a fool to buy a high end HDTV and then not use the digital input, as the TV processes everything digitally internally.

Re:No shock

[Shawn Parr]

This overlooks one group of people who actually exist in large numbers but are often overlooked:

3. You have a nice HDTV and HDMI digital for that. But you also have a very nice audio system, but one that you put together before the HDMI specification was well established and thus it does not have HDMI. But your Receiver/PrePro/Amplifiers are very good, and you don't want to just replace them just to get ones with HDMI built in. But luckily they can take 5.1 or 7.1 analog inputs from a player with good quality outputs.

This is exactly why I like the Oppo BluRay player. At the time for a minimal cost increase over other BR players I was able to use both a digital connection to my TV, and use the latest audio upgrades on BR along with my older, but very good, audio system. That being said I would never pay the $2000 plus for the 'high end' BR players. The Oppo is excellent, and I don't even have the special edition model with upgraded audio components. I'm sure it's fabulous, but the regular one I have is really really good.

Why replace perfectly good equipment just to get a new connector, when you can still use it and get great performance out of it? I occasionally get the itch to replace those components, but when I research new ones I just don't see enough upgrade for what it would cost to justify it at this point.