In Blandings Part 11, I described my experiences with the Toshiba HD-A1; I subsequently used that player for almost all of my HD DVD disc reviews. I found a few flaws in the player that disturbed me and I reached out to Toshiba for solutions. I’m still waiting for answers to a few of my questions, but perhaps as an indirect solution, Toshiba kindly offered to allow me to evaluate its top end second-generation player. I’ve had it for a while but I hesitated to publish my initial findings until I received and installed a firmware update. The player is now operating with firmware version 1.3/T19, which I’m assured is the most current.
I’ve put the player through its paces, evaluated it with signals and patterns from five different test discs, viewed and reviewed several HD DVDs, played my favorite HD DVD completely through, checked for hesitation on certain HD DVDs that caused problems on the HD-A1, and checked the player’s performance as a scaler for DVDs. I have good news and I have not so good news; some of you may not care about the latter, but for completeness and accuracy, I’ll offer my nitpicks for your consideration.
The Toshiba’s fit and finish are fine, although not quite up to the much more stylish Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player. But the reality is that I really don’t care whether or not the manufacturer invested in a fancy industrial design. I was satisfied with the appearance of the utilitarian HD-A1. My main concern is absolute performance and price-performance ratio.
The Good News
I wrote a few articles that described LSI chipsets from Broadcom and NEC that would handle decoding chores. The HD-XA2 is equipped with such circuitry, although I didn’t open the case to determine which vendor provided the parts. The important point is that this is more of a player with dedicated special purpose circuitry and less of a computer than the first generation players. There may be Intel inside, but it’s considerably less stressed; many of the processing tasks are now performed by dedicated hardware. The player is much faster as it “boots up” and much faster as it loads and begins to play an HD DVD. Booting up takes only about a half minute, and loading and playing an HD DVD takes little more than twenty seconds; this is much improved over the HD-A1.
The player extends its output format capabilities beyond its predecessors’ by supporting 1080p, a very welcome addition. And significantly, the player is equipped with Silicon Optix Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) REON scaler/processor integrated circuitry. This is a very highly regarded processing chipset that, among other things, scales standard definition material to the HD output resolution set by the user: 720p, 1080i, or 1080p.
Also significant is the player’s being equipped with an HDMI 1.3 output. This not only increases the color depth of the video (for those displays that can accept and take advantage of the full HDMI 1.3 video signal) but also will carry advanced audio CODEC bit streams to external audio decoders when they become available later in 2007.
The internal audio decoder can deal with the same CODECs as the first generation’s players, including Dolby Digital Plus and the lossless Dolby TrueHD, so audio support is not an issue. (The player does not support lossless DTS HD Master, but I don’t recall ever coming across an HD DVD that offered that audio option. That may not be the case in the future.)
I won’t burden you with the minutia of the initial setup procedure. I’ll simply mention that I set the player’s video aspect ratio to 16:9, the video output resolution to 1080p, and the speaker configuration to small with a subwoofer crossed over at 80 Hz. In addition to an extensive selection of HD DVDs, I used the HQV Benchmark HD DVD and DVD, the AVIA Guide to Home Theater DVD, the Digital Video Essentials DVD, and a typical THX Optimizer on DVD.
For HD DVD playback, this player is superb. I watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong, a very high quality presentation that still remains my favorite HD DVD and a terrific demonstration piece. I like to skip to the climax, starting from Kong’s climb to the top of the Empire State Building. The quiet scene of Kong and Naomi Watts’ Ann Darrow admiring the sunrise and each other shows off Kong’s complex pelt and the dense New York cityscape. When the biplanes attack, there are some very long shots in which a tiny Kong can be seen at the top of the building as even tinier biplanes fly toward him for another strafing run. I found the level of detail even more impressive than I recall for the HD-A1, an impression that was confirmed with the HD DVD test disc. However the differences are subtle and impossible to A/B compare, and not simply because I only had one copy of the HQV test HD DVD (it’s an HDMI switching issue; more about that soon). I also spun some favorite anamorphic DVDs, like Attack of the Clones. Standard definition discs in anamorphic video are scaled quite flawlessly, with a wonderful sharpness and smoothness that impressed me.
For a less subjective, more analytical look, I wish I had Joe Kane’s HD DVD Video Essentials to compare the players; alas I did not. I had to rely on the only HD DVD test disc in my possession, which is made by the same company that makes the player’s processing circuitry. But I’m going to give that HD DVD and its DVD predecessor the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were not specifically optimized to show off the Silicon Optix signal processing hardware. The HQV Benchmark HD DVD impressed with its resolution and exceptional visuals. And the HQV Benchmark DVD was scaled remarkably well by the HQV circuitry, as indeed it should have been.
There are other notable improvements. Error correction, either through improved algorithms or a bigger buffer or both, has been improved. During my viewing on the HD-A1 of the Miami Vice HD DVD for review, the disc hesitated, froze, and sputtered during the raid in the trailer park. That disc played flawlessly on the HD-XA2, smoothly and without a glitch.
I also appreciated Toshiba’s fixing the navigation problem I found while moving through the menus of the AVIA Guide to Home Theater DVD playing on the HD-A1. As I wrote in Blandings Part 11, drill down to the lowest nested menu level and the HD-A1 stops highlighting the menu items. The viewer must literally count the number and direction of remote control button pushes to maneuver to the item of choice. The HD-XA2 fixes that problem. (I’m surprised that a firmware update beyond 2.0 for the HD-A1 wasn’t issued that also includes a correction for that problem.)
I may have been pleased and impressed with the quality of the video produced from HD DVD and anamorphic DVD, but some problems remain and some new problems arise.
The Not So Good News
There is a Resume Play button on the remote control, but it does not apply to HD DVDs. Stop an HD DVD and neither the play button nor the resume button restarts an HD DVD where it was interrupted. The viewer is forced to start at the beginning, just as if the disc was loading for the first time. If the Sony player can resume a Blu-ray Disc from where it was interrupted, why can’t Toshiba HD DVD players resume an HD DVD from where it was stopped?
This is particularly frustrating if the HDMI connection to the display is interrupted for a couple of seconds; the HD DVD player goes into the stop mode and the viewer has to start the disc from scratch, working through tiresome warnings and declarations and promos and menus. So if you own a DVD and an HD DVD of the same title and you wish to play them synchronized while using an HDMI switcher to demonstrate for friends and relatives the remarkable improvement of HD over SD, forget it. Switch to the DVD and the HD DVD player stops. This is not the case for the Sony Blu-ray Disc player. So whenever I perform such a demo, it’s always BD versus DVD.
The low subwoofer output problem I reported in my January 8th column also remains. (At least for this problem, I can’t compliment Sony for taking the lead; the BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player has precisely the same flaw.) I played wideband pink noise from two test DVDs: The AVIA Guide to Home Theater and Digital Video Essentials. I used my Audio Control SA-3050A third-octave band analyzer to make the measurements. The discs produce proper bass levels when my external B&K Reference 30 decoder/preamp did the decoding of a digital audio bit stream. But for the HD DVD’s internal decoders, the player’s subwoofer output was approximately 16 dB lower than the center channel output when measured directly at the player’s 5.1 audio connectors.
Toshiba never responded to my original problem report about the audio. Sony sent me a brief email explaining that this is normal when small speakers with subwoofer are specified in the setup. That’s odd, since my B&K external decoder does perfect satellite/subwoofer gain matching and without my having to resort to increasing the subwoofer output level or decreasing the satellite output levels. I still maintain that this player flaw might be a misinterpretation by both Sony and Toshiba of the decoding standards.
There are problems playing back DVDs that are non-anamorphic; this applies to both non-anamorphic widescreen and full screen DVDs. If you’re considering buying a Toshiba HD DVD player but will also maintain your existing DVD player, you’ll have a choice of player for non-anamorphic DVD playback and you might find that your DVD player will offer better results than the HD DVD player. If your plan is to maintain two players, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs. But if your intent is to use a Toshiba HD DVD player as the sole disc playback instrument in your system, please read on.
As I previously mentioned, I was hoping that the video problems I discovered initially were corrected with the firmware update. They were not. The player continues to do some very odd things with non-anamorphic DVD video: depending on player setup, it is softened or suffers from geometric distortion or both. As with the HD-A1, for the most common player setup of 1080 output format and a display aspect ratio of 16:9, non-anamorphic DVDs are displayed with substantial black vertical bars on either side of the video. For full screen DVDs, this might be acceptable, except that the images are softened; detail is suppressed. And for non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs, there are the letterbox bars above and below the image in addition to the black pillars. So the non-anamorphic widescreen image is substantially reduced in size. By comparison, The Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player properly detects disc type and displays the images correctly; a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD occupies the full width of the screen and the images are shown in proper proportion.
To see if there might be a magical setup configuration that would play non-anamorphic DVDs properly, I experimented with combinations of player video output resolution (1080p and 480p) and player display aspect ratio (16:9 and 4:3); that’s four combinations. I examined test patterns from the four test DVDs I’ve already mentioned (two patterns from one of those discs); that’s twenty tests. The only proper result I achieved was for settings of 1080i/p and a 16:9 display driven by an anamorphic test pattern. I’d expect geometric distortions on my 16:9 projected image for player settings of 4:3 screen aspect ratio, but even 480p and 16:9 aspect ratio settings caused the player to produce excessive horizontal and vertical stretch for an anamorphic DVD; this appears as cropping caused by considerable overscan. For every single non-anamorphic test pattern, there were problems. They included improper horizontal and vertical stretches causing a similar overscan effect, disproportionate stretching causing improper proportions, and modest to severe softening of the image. I was unable to discover a combination of settings that played non-anamorphic DVDs properly.
I’ll also mention that these tests were inconvenient to accomplish; unlike the inexpensive HD-A1, the $799 HD-XA2 (Toshiba recently reduced the SRP from $1000) doesn’t permit the output resolution to be set on the fly. The viewer must stop playback, enter the setup menu, make the required change, exit the playback menu, and resume play. Fortunately, these tests were being performed with DVDs and the player does resume where interrupted for standard definition discs.
Closing Thoughts
HD formats are young and I have to keep reminding myself that in the first year or two of DVD’s existence, player glitches and disc/player incompatibilities occurred on a regular basis. As I recall, the first seamless branching DVD wreaked havoc with some players (I vaguely recall that might have been The Abyss). I still believe that HD on disc is the best thing ever to happen to home theater. A little patience and some responsive and responsible engineering by the player manufacturers and we can kiss the glitches goodbye.
The HD-XA2 is a splendid HD DVD player. The definition and level of detail are simply superb. Operation is faster and smoother with better boot-up times, better load times, and more robust error correction. Anamorphic DVD scaling is also superb, thanks to the HQV REON scaler/processor chipset. But problems remain, some rather surprising considering the SRP of the player. Since I own an HD DVD player and the Sony BD player, I have all the players I need to display properly every DVD, HD DVD, and BD in my collection. But if you choose to make any Toshiba HD DVD deck your sole home theater player, be prepared for some compromises when playing non-anamorphic DVDs.
I’ve put the player through its paces, evaluated it with signals and patterns from five different test discs, viewed and reviewed several HD DVDs, played my favorite HD DVD completely through, checked for hesitation on certain HD DVDs that caused problems on the HD-A1, and checked the player’s performance as a scaler for DVDs. I have good news and I have not so good news; some of you may not care about the latter, but for completeness and accuracy, I’ll offer my nitpicks for your consideration.
The Toshiba’s fit and finish are fine, although not quite up to the much more stylish Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player. But the reality is that I really don’t care whether or not the manufacturer invested in a fancy industrial design. I was satisfied with the appearance of the utilitarian HD-A1. My main concern is absolute performance and price-performance ratio.
The Good News
I wrote a few articles that described LSI chipsets from Broadcom and NEC that would handle decoding chores. The HD-XA2 is equipped with such circuitry, although I didn’t open the case to determine which vendor provided the parts. The important point is that this is more of a player with dedicated special purpose circuitry and less of a computer than the first generation players. There may be Intel inside, but it’s considerably less stressed; many of the processing tasks are now performed by dedicated hardware. The player is much faster as it “boots up” and much faster as it loads and begins to play an HD DVD. Booting up takes only about a half minute, and loading and playing an HD DVD takes little more than twenty seconds; this is much improved over the HD-A1.
The player extends its output format capabilities beyond its predecessors’ by supporting 1080p, a very welcome addition. And significantly, the player is equipped with Silicon Optix Hollywood Quality Video (HQV) REON scaler/processor integrated circuitry. This is a very highly regarded processing chipset that, among other things, scales standard definition material to the HD output resolution set by the user: 720p, 1080i, or 1080p.
Also significant is the player’s being equipped with an HDMI 1.3 output. This not only increases the color depth of the video (for those displays that can accept and take advantage of the full HDMI 1.3 video signal) but also will carry advanced audio CODEC bit streams to external audio decoders when they become available later in 2007.
The internal audio decoder can deal with the same CODECs as the first generation’s players, including Dolby Digital Plus and the lossless Dolby TrueHD, so audio support is not an issue. (The player does not support lossless DTS HD Master, but I don’t recall ever coming across an HD DVD that offered that audio option. That may not be the case in the future.)
I won’t burden you with the minutia of the initial setup procedure. I’ll simply mention that I set the player’s video aspect ratio to 16:9, the video output resolution to 1080p, and the speaker configuration to small with a subwoofer crossed over at 80 Hz. In addition to an extensive selection of HD DVDs, I used the HQV Benchmark HD DVD and DVD, the AVIA Guide to Home Theater DVD, the Digital Video Essentials DVD, and a typical THX Optimizer on DVD.
For HD DVD playback, this player is superb. I watched Peter Jackson’s King Kong, a very high quality presentation that still remains my favorite HD DVD and a terrific demonstration piece. I like to skip to the climax, starting from Kong’s climb to the top of the Empire State Building. The quiet scene of Kong and Naomi Watts’ Ann Darrow admiring the sunrise and each other shows off Kong’s complex pelt and the dense New York cityscape. When the biplanes attack, there are some very long shots in which a tiny Kong can be seen at the top of the building as even tinier biplanes fly toward him for another strafing run. I found the level of detail even more impressive than I recall for the HD-A1, an impression that was confirmed with the HD DVD test disc. However the differences are subtle and impossible to A/B compare, and not simply because I only had one copy of the HQV test HD DVD (it’s an HDMI switching issue; more about that soon). I also spun some favorite anamorphic DVDs, like Attack of the Clones. Standard definition discs in anamorphic video are scaled quite flawlessly, with a wonderful sharpness and smoothness that impressed me.
For a less subjective, more analytical look, I wish I had Joe Kane’s HD DVD Video Essentials to compare the players; alas I did not. I had to rely on the only HD DVD test disc in my possession, which is made by the same company that makes the player’s processing circuitry. But I’m going to give that HD DVD and its DVD predecessor the benefit of the doubt and assume that they were not specifically optimized to show off the Silicon Optix signal processing hardware. The HQV Benchmark HD DVD impressed with its resolution and exceptional visuals. And the HQV Benchmark DVD was scaled remarkably well by the HQV circuitry, as indeed it should have been.
There are other notable improvements. Error correction, either through improved algorithms or a bigger buffer or both, has been improved. During my viewing on the HD-A1 of the Miami Vice HD DVD for review, the disc hesitated, froze, and sputtered during the raid in the trailer park. That disc played flawlessly on the HD-XA2, smoothly and without a glitch.
I also appreciated Toshiba’s fixing the navigation problem I found while moving through the menus of the AVIA Guide to Home Theater DVD playing on the HD-A1. As I wrote in Blandings Part 11, drill down to the lowest nested menu level and the HD-A1 stops highlighting the menu items. The viewer must literally count the number and direction of remote control button pushes to maneuver to the item of choice. The HD-XA2 fixes that problem. (I’m surprised that a firmware update beyond 2.0 for the HD-A1 wasn’t issued that also includes a correction for that problem.)
I may have been pleased and impressed with the quality of the video produced from HD DVD and anamorphic DVD, but some problems remain and some new problems arise.
The Not So Good News
There is a Resume Play button on the remote control, but it does not apply to HD DVDs. Stop an HD DVD and neither the play button nor the resume button restarts an HD DVD where it was interrupted. The viewer is forced to start at the beginning, just as if the disc was loading for the first time. If the Sony player can resume a Blu-ray Disc from where it was interrupted, why can’t Toshiba HD DVD players resume an HD DVD from where it was stopped?
This is particularly frustrating if the HDMI connection to the display is interrupted for a couple of seconds; the HD DVD player goes into the stop mode and the viewer has to start the disc from scratch, working through tiresome warnings and declarations and promos and menus. So if you own a DVD and an HD DVD of the same title and you wish to play them synchronized while using an HDMI switcher to demonstrate for friends and relatives the remarkable improvement of HD over SD, forget it. Switch to the DVD and the HD DVD player stops. This is not the case for the Sony Blu-ray Disc player. So whenever I perform such a demo, it’s always BD versus DVD.
The low subwoofer output problem I reported in my January 8th column also remains. (At least for this problem, I can’t compliment Sony for taking the lead; the BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player has precisely the same flaw.) I played wideband pink noise from two test DVDs: The AVIA Guide to Home Theater and Digital Video Essentials. I used my Audio Control SA-3050A third-octave band analyzer to make the measurements. The discs produce proper bass levels when my external B&K Reference 30 decoder/preamp did the decoding of a digital audio bit stream. But for the HD DVD’s internal decoders, the player’s subwoofer output was approximately 16 dB lower than the center channel output when measured directly at the player’s 5.1 audio connectors.
Toshiba never responded to my original problem report about the audio. Sony sent me a brief email explaining that this is normal when small speakers with subwoofer are specified in the setup. That’s odd, since my B&K external decoder does perfect satellite/subwoofer gain matching and without my having to resort to increasing the subwoofer output level or decreasing the satellite output levels. I still maintain that this player flaw might be a misinterpretation by both Sony and Toshiba of the decoding standards.
There are problems playing back DVDs that are non-anamorphic; this applies to both non-anamorphic widescreen and full screen DVDs. If you’re considering buying a Toshiba HD DVD player but will also maintain your existing DVD player, you’ll have a choice of player for non-anamorphic DVD playback and you might find that your DVD player will offer better results than the HD DVD player. If your plan is to maintain two players, feel free to skip the next couple of paragraphs. But if your intent is to use a Toshiba HD DVD player as the sole disc playback instrument in your system, please read on.
As I previously mentioned, I was hoping that the video problems I discovered initially were corrected with the firmware update. They were not. The player continues to do some very odd things with non-anamorphic DVD video: depending on player setup, it is softened or suffers from geometric distortion or both. As with the HD-A1, for the most common player setup of 1080 output format and a display aspect ratio of 16:9, non-anamorphic DVDs are displayed with substantial black vertical bars on either side of the video. For full screen DVDs, this might be acceptable, except that the images are softened; detail is suppressed. And for non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs, there are the letterbox bars above and below the image in addition to the black pillars. So the non-anamorphic widescreen image is substantially reduced in size. By comparison, The Sony BDP-S1 Blu-ray Disc player properly detects disc type and displays the images correctly; a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD occupies the full width of the screen and the images are shown in proper proportion.
To see if there might be a magical setup configuration that would play non-anamorphic DVDs properly, I experimented with combinations of player video output resolution (1080p and 480p) and player display aspect ratio (16:9 and 4:3); that’s four combinations. I examined test patterns from the four test DVDs I’ve already mentioned (two patterns from one of those discs); that’s twenty tests. The only proper result I achieved was for settings of 1080i/p and a 16:9 display driven by an anamorphic test pattern. I’d expect geometric distortions on my 16:9 projected image for player settings of 4:3 screen aspect ratio, but even 480p and 16:9 aspect ratio settings caused the player to produce excessive horizontal and vertical stretch for an anamorphic DVD; this appears as cropping caused by considerable overscan. For every single non-anamorphic test pattern, there were problems. They included improper horizontal and vertical stretches causing a similar overscan effect, disproportionate stretching causing improper proportions, and modest to severe softening of the image. I was unable to discover a combination of settings that played non-anamorphic DVDs properly.
I’ll also mention that these tests were inconvenient to accomplish; unlike the inexpensive HD-A1, the $799 HD-XA2 (Toshiba recently reduced the SRP from $1000) doesn’t permit the output resolution to be set on the fly. The viewer must stop playback, enter the setup menu, make the required change, exit the playback menu, and resume play. Fortunately, these tests were being performed with DVDs and the player does resume where interrupted for standard definition discs.
Closing Thoughts
HD formats are young and I have to keep reminding myself that in the first year or two of DVD’s existence, player glitches and disc/player incompatibilities occurred on a regular basis. As I recall, the first seamless branching DVD wreaked havoc with some players (I vaguely recall that might have been The Abyss). I still believe that HD on disc is the best thing ever to happen to home theater. A little patience and some responsive and responsible engineering by the player manufacturers and we can kiss the glitches goodbye.
The HD-XA2 is a splendid HD DVD player. The definition and level of detail are simply superb. Operation is faster and smoother with better boot-up times, better load times, and more robust error correction. Anamorphic DVD scaling is also superb, thanks to the HQV REON scaler/processor chipset. But problems remain, some rather surprising considering the SRP of the player. Since I own an HD DVD player and the Sony BD player, I have all the players I need to display properly every DVD, HD DVD, and BD in my collection. But if you choose to make any Toshiba HD DVD deck your sole home theater player, be prepared for some compromises when playing non-anamorphic DVDs.
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Mr. Blandings Part 13 - March 2007
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Toshiba’s Top End HD-XA2 HD DVD Player
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