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A more sober and sane article on the Lexicon from Chris Martens

Posted by Jazz Inmate (A) on January 28, 2010 at 08:44:42

In Reply to: Lexicon busted passing Oppo off as a $3500 Blu-ray player posted by soundnut on January 18, 2010 at 06:37:19:

Seems that Lexicon's involvement raised the bar for all Oppo owners--pretty ironic considering the lynch mob of Oppo fans attacking Lexicon.

Excerpts: I asked again whether Oppo and Lexicon had worked on the BD-30 and learned that in fact they had. Marc Kellom, Harman International’s head of High Performance A/V products, indicated that the same supplier that builds the Oppo player in its entirety manufactures core elements of the BD-30 in China. Final assembly, firmware loading, and quality control testing for the BD-30, however, take place in Lexicon’s facility based in Elkhart, Indiana.

Kellom explained that during the development of both players, Lexicon had evaluated the then-current Oppo design and suggested some video-related changes—changes that were eventually incorporated in production versions of both players. Similarly, Lexicon bore the costs of having the Oppo design put through conformance testing relative to various worldwide consumer safety standards and to put it through THX qualification testing, again leading to changes that were incorporated into both players.

Knowing that it would sell its version of the player through its upscale, service-oriented retail dealer channel (where the standing expectation is that dealers will provide expert custom installation/integration services), Lexicon decided that its version of the player would need several changes vis-à-vis a standard Oppo player. First, it required a significant more beefy and elegant looking chassis (and one strong enough to support rack mounting), plus firmware modifications that would make the player easier for dealers to integrated with other Lexicon high-performance A/V products (e.g., the MC-12). Second, the player required formal THX certification—if only for the sake of consistency with other THX-certified Lexicon products. Third, the BD-30 would need to ship with somewhat different accessories than those that come with the standard Oppo player, including a set of rack-mounting “ears” plus a copy of the well-regarded Joe Kane Productions Digital Video Essentials HD Basics, Blu-ray Edition HD set-up toolkit disk.

The upshot, then, is that the BD-30 takes the core chassis, circuit boards, and drive mechanism of a standard Oppo BDP-83 universal Blu-ray player, and mounts them within a heavily built Lexicon enclosure, “re-flashes” the player’s firmware EPROMs with Lexicon-spec code, and then performs its own battery of final quality control tests in the US.

At any rate, the video and audio performance characteristics of the Lexicon BD-30 and Oppo BDP-83 are essentially identical, with one small difference. The much heavier chassis casework of the BD-30 makes its mechanical operation noticeably quieter than the Oppo.

Given that The Perfect Vision has already done an in-depth review of the BDP-83, we have elected not to do a full review of the Lexicon. However, if we had prepared a full review, the concluding paragraphs might have read something like this:

The Lexicon BD-30 is an excellent universal Blu-ray player, offering exemplary video performance and very good, though not quite great, sound quality. I expect the player will find favor among customers who appreciate the benefits and services that Lexicon’s excellent retail dealer network can provide.

Even so, there is an element of disappointment here, and it revolves around the fact that the BD-30 does not, apart from its somewhat quieter mechanical operation, improve upon the core A/V performance of the inexpensive Oppo BDP-83 upon which it is based. Given the BD-30’s hefty price tag, I think customers might well have expected more.

• http://www.avguide.com/blog/first-listen-lexicon-bd-30-unive   (Open in New Window)

Edits: 01/28/10

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