Silver machine

Pioneer UDP-LX500 universal disc player

Time moves on. First DVD players, then Blu-ray players and now Ultra-HD Blu-ray players, went from expensive and rare to mere commodity items. My favourite premium brand of disc spinners (and that of many others), Oppo Digital, has now unaccountably decided to stop making them. So just when I think that times are darkest for those of us who like their equipment to have that little extra, along comes Pioneer Electronics with the UDP-LX500, a $1999 high-end universal disc player. Hoorah!

Equipment

So, ‘universal’, huh? How universal? There’s a list of disc logos printed on the cover of the manual (a real 60-pager, no downloads required!). They are Ultra-HD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD Audio/Video and Super Audio CD. Inside, the manual also lists audio CDs, along with all the writeable and re-writeable versions of CDs, DVDs and BDs (apart from DVD-RAM). Not playable is HD-DVD (of course), nor VCD. I’d call that universal.

Oh, ah! I take some of that back. I popped a Video CD into the player, and yes it