PIONEER UDP-LX500
The optical disc arrived in most of our entertainment systems with CDs. At the time, music files were too big to move around any other way, and movie files even more so. But by drilling tiny holes in a layer of silver, encasing it in hard-wearing plastic and then spinning it around to be read by a laser in the digital equivalent of a turntable, we could read back a file with, hopefully, the minimum of errors. As technology progressed, they made the holes and the laser wavelengths smaller, and the amount of data per disc could be increased. First DVD players, then Blu-ray players and now Ultra-HD Blu-ray players went from expensive and rare to mere commodity items.
Today, with storage ‘cheap’ and streaming speeds which can handle a 4K movie, at least if you’re lucky enough to have a decent NBN connection, you’d think the optical disc might be redundant. And perhaps it
