Gadgetory

this is a review of the BDP 105 by Apple this unit is relatively new it's replacing the 95 the bdp 95 that was quite well received from last year it is a blu-ray player with a couple of new features in addition to that it also has a little bit of a price bump over the 95 the 95 was roughly a thousand this one is 1200 both great players I'm going to go through the additional features and just let you know kind of how it performed this has a networking capabilities in addition to playing blu-rays sa CDs CDs it actually plays a quite a great wide variety of format types pretty much anything you can throw at it you can play music through a connected hard drive through the USB ports there are a lot of connections on this unit so anything you really want to connect to it it'll probably do which is a really fun kind of thing I found that the versatility from just everything you can put into it to everything you get out is great you can see that they have both a USB and MLH HDMI IN as well as a headphone jack you can also plug in an MHL cord and connect this to your phone to play media directly through your phone without needing to connect to an external charger the charge actually goes through that port as well which is kind of a nice feature the headphone jack in the front located right here is fairly nice I didn't find that it pushed the really really high-end headphones to very loud levels however for in-ear listening around 50 I felt was a comfortable listening level with my pair of LCD 3s I found a hundred to be a comfortable listening level but not so those of you who really like loud amplifiers you might want to look at an external headphone amplifier and run it through the outputs in the back which are I got a little bit better sound out of so as you can see there are quite a bit of different connections any direction you like to go right here you can see we have 7.1 analog outputs for your surround sound system it is a surround sound player as well obviously being blu-ray the outputs from this I found our exceptionally great if you do unless you have a very very high end processor I would suggest connecting your analog outputs directly from the unit into your amplifier and instead of going through the HDMI output here you will get it usually get a much better sound doing it so you look here this is what this is kind of what makes this unit very special for a stereo listener it has dedicated stereo analog outputs located here and as you can see it has both the unbalanced and the balanced connections there's also a separate DAC chip just for these outputs separated from these so there's a 1 - chip as ESS saber DAC for this and for these outputs the other feature that this player has that a lot of other ones don't which is very nice is the digital audio inputs here these are not outputs these are actually inputs where you can plug in a computer coaxial or optical connection into this to take advantage of that same saber DAC that and I did test these against this in the sound quality was excellent very very good for connection to a computer even when compared to some of the other DAX that I used I was very impressed you may notice here that the HDMI there's also two outputs so you can connect it to two different TVs if you'd like one of the things that's really nice about this unit is that you can plug in in outside video source directly into this to take advantage of the video processing that this thing does in addition to be able to take advantage of the audio so with this one you can plug your TV feed or what other feed you like into there and you through an input selector it can actually select whatever you want it's almost like a processor at that point because it has so many inputs and you can try a lot of different things with it to see what works best for you obviously it connects wirelessly through an adapter and wired to allow streaming for Netflix and Vudu and a lot of other kind of streaming it also does Pandora for audio right now more firmware updates should give it more options as they become available you can see here that the remote for the Apple 105 is pretty much your standard issue it's rather large not the smallest thing no unique keyboard but it does have as you can see near the top the dedicated Netflix and Vudu button which is kind of new that's fun probably one of the most important buttons on this thing is the input button here which is fairly unique for a DVD player blu-ray player because it allows you to run through all the different inputs that has be it HDMI for video these USB DAC audio inputs coaxial even the ports in the front so that is kind of an important feature there mass accessible through the remote the Android application is mimics the actual remote control pretty closely it works great it's very quick and responsive I didn't have any real issues here it would be nice if there were a little bit more file management for all the streaming and playing services that the Oppo offers but for right now I mean it definitely works as a remote control overall I found the Sun to be quite comparable to the 95 and that may be because the DAC chip is the same as last year I think that Oppo did a great job with this 9 to 2 really keep the noise floor down and keep it clarity up the player still remains to be one of my favorites in this price range and one of my favorites overall to be honest with you I really enjoyed the sound that comes out of this one it's very organic and live it's one of those players where you can just sit back and listen to the music and enjoy it's one of the few blu-ray players out there available at this price point with really the feature set that it has a lot of the higher-end stuff gets expects potentially more pricey however at $1200 while that may seem like a lot of money the sound that you get from it is is right up there in that range I really enjoy it's very clear the DAX performed exceptionally well playing a CD and by themselves when you run them through the USB deck I mean that's quite unique functionality wise everything is in working order it just the quality in the build of this thing showcases a lot of attention to detail from the build in the front to the suspension of the unit itself there's you can tell when you set it down there's vibration reduction and a suspension system through the feet it's a very well-built piece of machine it is quite hefty and large it's rather big compared to most of your standard blu-ray players but it is a solid piece of machinery and and I and I think there's a good amount of craftsmanship that went into building it so that is very nice