The Official Sony BDP-S550 Owner's Thread - Page 53

yeti just a stab in the dark here but apparently your television has a problem with optical block, dont know if you have heard of it or your set suffers from it? its supposed to cause pink dots and weird artifacts on the screen etc. probly not the reason for your lack of wow factor with blu ray but might be a factor as many owners of that set are not happy with it. try the new rambo film as its a fabulous transfer and if you dont see the improvement then id be very surprised. the only other thing i can think of is that your set supports 1080i and does some sort of conversion to 24fps which might be a problem? maybe some one more knowledgeable could chip in to help. i have a 720p projector and 84" screen and the difference is amazing. good luck with it m8.

Afternoon all, new member. I also have the Denon AVR-3802 and recently purchased the Sony S-550. Thanks to all the forum members who have discussed their issues and volunteered solutions. It meant that I knew how to configure everything straight off and avoid any teething problems. Much appreciated!

Just to refer back to the conversations a month back concerning this setup. In regard to up the LFE by 10+ db (or more), on the Denon 3802 did people select the "Tone Control" button on the far left and then select "Base" to up the LFE db. Just want to make sure I have done it right. And yes Kbueno, I found using the external inputs you have to turn up the volume a lot more on the amp.

Also, I see people are talking about setting all the speakers to small. I believe I know the text book answer to this (because you have a sub). But I wanted to know the personal reasons for doing this.. I had the Fronts set to large previously thinking it would produce a richer sound... as they are quite capable in there own right. So would appreciate peoples thoughts.

Anyway, very pleased with the S-550...just need to rob a bank so i can upgrade my 1 year old sony 1080p tv to one of the new 24p 200hz.. ones...
Don't you just hate technology changing so fast at times!!

The picture looks good, I guess I was just expecting it to look even more so once I got my 550. I am not having any artifact issues with my tv. Maybe my expectations were high.

I've had my 550 for about a week and when I first got it the difference seemed subtle and I was a bit disappointed. But the more movies I watch the bigger the difference I notice in both PQ and SQ and am very pleased that I went BD.

One of the big things I did was to watch a scene from a movie on BD and then watch the same scene on DVD and there was a real difference.

So your issue is that you think it is slow to start. Well it is. However it depends a lot on the disc you load. Load a DVD and it is fairly fast. Load a Blueray and it varies from 30ish+ seconds to minutes. This is normal. Also depends it you have fast power on enabled (or what ever it is called.) You can read thru past messages that talk a lot about startup time of this player and others.

Why you think this has anything to do with the Bravia seems like a premature theory to jump to. Start it up without the remote in some controlled tests and see if you see a difference in times; then report back. As far as I remember no one else has noticed anything like this and it would be very surprising if the TV made it start slower.

Also, I see people are talking about setting all the speakers to small. I believe I know the text book answer to this (because you have a sub). But I wanted to know the personal reasons for doing this.. I had the Fronts set to large previously thinking it would produce a richer sound... as they are quite capable in there own right. So would appreciate peoples thoughts.

First of all, I've had my 550S for a little over a week now, and am very satisfied with its performance. Via HDMI, I have it connected to my Denon 4308ci and then to my Sony XBR4. The 550S recognizes the 1080p/24 capability of the XBR4 each and every time I play a BD. Sound tracks are startling. The one thing I’ve learned is the BD disk must be clean to avoid any A/V dropouts. A good practice in any event.

Now, large vrs. small. This has been cussed and discussed in great length in the Audyssey forum. I have a 7.1 system. In my receiver, all of my speakers are set to small. Audyssey set all of their cutovers at 60Hz, so I left that alone. The advantages of having the SW produce the 60Hz – 20Hz bass is: 1) it allows the receiver to use its 140 watts per speaker to produce the mid bass, mid range, and highs; 2)it allows a smoother transition between the speakers and the SW; 3)I can control the amount of volume produced by the SW giving me greater flexibility to tune my system to the sound I like; 4)I avoid the possibility of producing “double bass” between the mains, the surrounds and the SW; 5) The SW is engineered to take the abuse of producing the lower frequencies giving me the confidence that my mains and surrounds won’t exceed their excursion lengths preventing possible damage; 6) Consistency in the bass frequency response since sending low frequency signals to multiple loudspeakers can result in multiple and diverging frequency responses.

These are just my opinions. I’m in no way an audio expert. It all comes down to personal taste.

What is best Sharp (default) or Soft in audio settings? Anybody ... I think this only is the analog out setting. I also use Wide range as well for a warm sound...

If you are not seeing a difference in PQ it is probably due to your display settings. The BR will have more depth and definition in details. By definition it has to, since it is the only native 1080P signal you are looking at. HD TV and SD DVD will all be processed in some way, assuming your display is 1080P. If you can not see difference in details then you should check your display settings or hve it calibrated.

If you set the AVR for multichannel in and select the appropriate track on the 550, and also be sure to change its default from MIX to DIRECT, you will get lossless audio and you should be able to hear a difference there, especially on lively tracks like Iron Man.

Actually this player boots up pretty fast, if you leave it in quick start mode. It may use more power but it cuts the load times way down. All BR players are slow due to the bloated extras they pile on the disc. My first one took minutes to load and at first I thought it was broken. That's why they put those cute little moving icons at the beginning of the movies so you can tell that it is actually loading and not just stuck. Trust me, the 550 is a rocket ship compared to a second generation player.

Actually the 550 seems much more tolerant than my previous player. So far I have not had to wipe down one disc, and I get a lot of NetFlix rentals. With my previous machine I got hang ups or load failures, especially with rentals, and I got into the habit of always washing the rental disc before I ever put it in. So far I have not cleaned a single NetFlix rental and it has played all of them perfectly. I am pleasently surprised. Overall though, BR players are more sensitive to defects or blemshes in the disc than standard players.

There's still something unique to the 350 and 550 that seem to make them more sensitive than other players.

For example, 350s and 550s had problems with many copies of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when my first generation BDP-S1 played through with no problems.

Likewise, many 350s and 550s had problems with Baraka that seem to have been rooted in a slight warp in the disc occurring due to their cardboard sleeve packaging.

So I actually think Sony's latest players are less tolerant of disc issues than their older players.

Time will tell if that's something that can be addressed in software or not.

My copy of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull has played the first time and every other time I've played it. As a matter of fact, I've watched 30 + movies on my S550 with not so much as a hiccup. Baracka was not one of them though. I don't Netflix however.

My copy of Baraka plays fine but it came in a standard BD disc and no envelope or maybe you were referring to copies from Netflix.

I've been using the S550 for about a week now and am pretty pleased with the unit. It has its limitations, which will hopefully be addressed via firmware update. That said, the unit's got a polished feel throughout, which produces a good user experience once you get the settings dialed in correctly. Which brings me to a question...

I decided to try the S550 on an HD-ready Sony display that happens to be 4:3 (KP53HS10). With the aspect ratio in the video settings to "original", BDs look fine (letterboxed, as expected) but widescreen anamorphic DVDs play in fullscreen. When changing the video setting to "fixed aspect ratio" the SD DVD plays in letterbox, and so do BDs, but the BDs viewable area is reduced. A letterbox within a letterbox, more or less. This is even more pronounced on discs with a non-16:9 aspect ratio (many discs, but as far as I saw, Ironman is one such example).

Is this to be expected? Is there a combination of settings that I can use to get SD DVDs to play in their expected widescreen/letterbox and have BDs display with the same (non-reduced) letterbox area?

I use to have an old "HD-ready" Sony 4:3 CRT of the same era and remember that it had special settings to auto detect anamorphic/enhanced DVDs which caused it do enter some special mode. You should check your Sony TV settings because you may find the right combination of player and tv settings to get things working for both cases.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Yeti35 View Post
Ok, this may sound stupid, but I think I am missing something with this Blu Ray standard.

Yes - you have a tiny television.
Besides potentially having a problem with your TV, it is also difficult to see a big improvement with such a tiny screen.

When you get to real HT with 100"+ front projection, the difference is very noticeable.

I recall this as well.

Perpaps I didn't cover all the combinations, because the ones I did try didn't produce the desired result, at least not for both types of discs, with the same settings.

That said, I didn't delve as deep into the display settings on the CRT as I have on the player, so I will spend more time with that. Thanks.

I find it to be more tolerant than my previous SD DVD player. I have not had one issue with this player since I bought it.

Tiny, since when is a 42" tiny? Who the hell has room normally for a 100" screen? The TV is fine other then it is not a 1080p and I never said the picture looks like crap, I was just expecting way more. Thanks for your unreasonable solution to my issue.

I bought my S550 last night because no where I looked had the Panasonic BD55 which has similar features to this unit. I like the menus and am OK with the load time. I don't have HDMI on my TV at this time so I'm using component and there are some artifacts, most noticably flashing in areas of fine detail while watching my 1 BD, The Dark Knight. This happens in Dent's tie or on buildings during panoramic flyover shots of the city. I'm wondering if an HDMI>DVI will cure that. Build quality of this unit is solid. I've yet to test SD DVDs or any DVD+Rs that I've recorded but I expect I'll be satisfied. A new receiver and TV are probably in order someday...

HDMI -> DVI would give a better picture but I believe that HDMI does not support copy protection (I may be wrong here) so it would not be an option. As for correcting the artifacts you are seeing, I suspect no one would be able to answer that unless they had a similar setup and TV as you.

I am going to correct myself. Depending on the age of your set the DVI input may or may not support the HDCP, copy protection, protocol. My old set did not, but yours might.

Woohoo! I get to join the club soon. I ordered a 550 to replace my 301. Should be here before Christmas, but I'll have the family give ot to me as a gift.

According to Sony, they advertise their S550 drives to be more tolerant to disc damage like warpage.


From Sonystyle....
Precision Drive system

Precision Drive system for BD allows you to play back some Blu-ray Disc media or DVDs that may have been damaged or warped -- with minimal degradation of picture quality2.

Hello all,

I've has the S550 for about 2 weeks now. I've noticed a problem with picture and audio sync when using the analog outputs for high def audio. There is an audio sync capability on the unit but it has 5 msec increments which does not allow me to sync up perfectly.

If I switch to optical output (meaning I am getting DD or DTS) the picture sync's up fine.

I'm not sure why this is happening. Anyone else using the analog out and having a problem?

thanks...marcus

I can check it out tomorrow since that is how mine is hooked up. I had not noticed but I was not paying that close attention to it.

I have put 75 BDs thru analog audio with no sync problems.
If I use any built-in sync setting it sounds like an echo chamber.
S550--->Sony TA-P9000ES analog preamp

I checked mine also I use the analog outs and didn't notice any sync difference in the audio

I'm using analogs out and have not had any audio sync issues. Analogs out to Onkyo 805.

That's all well and good, but the facts remain that:

1) Many, many people had their copies of Indy 4 freeze up at the same point on the disc.

2) Many people had issues playing Baraka that went away when they removed the disc from the cardboard package and let it "rest" in a conventional BD, DVD or CD case for a few days before playing it.

(Baraka comes in a sleeve built into its cardboard package rather than in a conventional plastic BD case - I'm not talking about copies received via Netflix.)

The first may have been a software bug, but the second definitely seemed to be an issue with perhaps slightly warped discs, given it went away for many; the only solution to the Indy 4 problem was to replace the disc.