Cambridge 650BD DATASHEET
REVIEW
Blu Order
Establishing itself at the top of the budget Blu ray tree, Noel Keywood shows true faith in
Cambridge Audio's new 650BD...
ithin a very short
time of receiving this
Blu-ray player I was
enjoying the won
derfully smooth and
W
of the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra
swelling up behind Lang Lang, play
ing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto
No2 – on SACD! The new 650BD
reviewed here is one of the first
‘universal’ players to become avail
able to Britons, able to play not just
Blu-ray discs of all varieties, but also
SACDs, DVD-As and CDs, no less.
The 650BD will play
except LPs, making Cambridge fast
off the mark in getting out a player
to rival the Oppos we mention so
often, sadly available only in U.S. Bluray Region A form. The Cambridge
comes in UK and U.S. versions.
This is a sophisticated player
and, being from a dedicated audio
manufacturer, has been purposed to
do a good job with every silver audio
disc ever conceived as a commercial
format. It also plays Blu-ray movies of
course, and DVD movies, upscaling
them to Blu-ray resolution, to
improve picture quality. To be crystal
clear though, the difference between
this Blu-ray player and most others
you’ll encounter lies in its ability to
lush sound of strings
all audio discs
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play SACD and DVD-A, since even
budget models from Samsung and
Philips will play CD and DVD video,
as well as Blu-ray, but not these
‘obsolete’ formats. To date Blu-ray
has been seen as an AV format, all
about movies; only Oppo have made
an issue of audio quality – and their
players have become very popular
largely as a result. I have been
hankering after Oppo’s BDP-83 as a
one-box do-it-all machine, but instead
Cambridge Audio’s 650BD arrived at
our offices and turned out to be a
near equivalent – a pleasant surprise!
Audio buffs would sneer at using
a player like this as a stand alone CD
player within a hi-fi system, but you
can use it as a decent CD transport,
connected via S/PDIF to a DAC, or
HDMI to an AV receiver, because
our measurements show it has very
low jitter. However, Blu-ray players
like this are really purposed for use
with an AV receiver and Cambridge
Audio recommend their new 650R,
but I used a Marantz SR8002 7.1
receiver in what is effectively a
stereo hi-fi system driving World
Audio Design KLS9 loudspeakers
for the front stage, plus Usher S520s as Surrounds, in a 4.0 system
deliberately devoid of subwoofer
(don’t like ‘em!) and Centre
‘speaker (great if you like mono).
I do occasionally hook in Back
loudspeakers behind the listening
position but they contribute little
for music purposes. Most surroundsound music discs use the rear
Surround loudspeakers for ambience,
so do little work.
A system like this does a fine job
with pure audio discs like CD, SACD,
etc, and also with Blu-ray and DVD
music videos, as well as with movies,
although it isn’t purposed for massive
explosions. The new Cambridge
player can handle all of these discs, in
most of the flavours they come in.
Trying to understand what a
player like this offers is easiest if split
into roles. It can be connected up
simply using phono cables, because
it has ‘traditional’ analogue outputs,
in the form of phono sockets.
There’s a full set of eight (Front L&R,
Centre, Surround L&R, Back L&R,
Subwoofer) to feed an (old) receiver
having analogue inputs only. With a
player of this quality the HDMI digital
multichannel link should be used
in preference to analogue cables,
but Cambridge provide a full set of
phono outputs all the same, to aid
compatibility with a wide range of
older products out there. They also
provide an internal, user selectable
REVIEW
mix-down associated with these
analogue outputs that turns them
to 5.1 or Stereo, or matrix encoded
Lt and Rt. There are no dedicated
Stereo outputs; the Front Left and
Right sockets are used with the mix
down set to Stereo.
I mention all this because it is a
little confusing. Even Cambridge omit
to mention that the Loudspeaker
Set Up menu of the player affects
only the analogue outputs, having
absolutely no affect upon the HDMI
link data. The analogue outputs are
secondary to the digital HDMI digital
link so do not use super high quality
onboard DACs. No one is pretending
this is a top quality standalone CD
player.
There are traditional S/PDIF
digital audio outputs too, in both
electrical phono socket form, and
optical TOSLINK. These transmit a
clean digital stereo signal and are a
good way to connect to an external
hi-fi DAC or receiver, another role.
Ideally, the player is connected
to a receiver via its HDMI cable,
which in 1.3 version is able to stream
basic digital (PCM), plus raw SACD
code (DSD) as well as DTS HD
Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD,
both forms of losslessly compressed
digital, at up to 24/192 resolution
per channel over seven channels
in the Blu-ray spec. Used like this,
where all processing is carried out
in the receiver, the 650BD becomes
a transport, simply sending raw data
to the receiver – and this is the best
arrangement. Ironically, it makes all
the onboard processing Cambridge
include redundant, but then this
affects all current Blu-ray players.
Alternatively, to match older
receivers unable to process anything
other than basic digital code, or
PCM, the 650BD can be set to
convert all proprietary digital formats
to PCM before sending them out
over the HDMI link. I tested both
arrangements, as usual, using a 24/192
2L ‘Divertimenti’ disc and the 650BD
converted SACD, DTS HD Master
Audio and Dolby TrueHD to PCM
without difficulty. Set to work as a
transport (i.e. to Bitstream output),
the Cambridge played a wide variety
of CDs. HDCDs (remember them?),
DVD-As and SACDs without a glitch,
and it also played all varieties of Bluray movie soundtrack, from Dolby
and DTS, as well as straight PCM,
making it a great universal player. This
is one of the UK’s first players to do
it all – and not at a daft price!
Because the 650BD carries as
many video options as audio options,
its set up menus are extensive and
the handbook is required reading. You
can find it at www.cambridgeaudio.
com. Ominously, there is a ‘get you
going‘ wizard and, in the tradition of
wizards, pioneered by Microsoft, it
was nonsensical, saying press ‘OK”
when there was no OK to press
(they mean Enter) and asking a user
to choose a video output, with no
instructions on how to do so...
Blu-ray players are deadly slow
to load and – more annoyingly – to
unload. The 650BD is advertised as
being ‘fast’ – and it is, taking just
10 seconds to load a Blu-ray disc
or CD, and 5 seconds to stop and
eject either. With the long-to-load
Java menu of John Meyer’s ‘Where
The Light Is’ disc, it took 30 seconds
to load, the same as the Philips
BDP7500 I tested in our March 2010
issue. The player returns to where
play last ended when switched on, or
stopped, even after a disc is ejected
and this takes some getting used to.
Stop must be pressed twice to clear
this behaviour. The disc menu (Top
menu) cannot be accessed from
standstill, only when playing.
Styling and finish were a little
prosaic, but build quality was
www.hi-fiworld.co.uk JUNE 2010 HI-FI WORLD 35
satisfactory. An excellent OSD
appears on the TV when the remote
control’s Info button is pressed;
you get data rate as well as coding
scheme. With DTS HD Master Audio
alone clocking up at 22Mbps, against
1.2Mbps for CD there’s no doubt
that Blu-ray delivers a lot of music
data. Slightly disappointing was a
swishing noise that came from the
player’s mechanism when playing Bluray discs (but not CDs), just audible
at times when 4m from the player,
during soft classical music.
The remote has a Draw Open
function, which saves time, plus
Power Off, and a Pure Audio function
that switches off the display and
video, which goes to Black Level
(video silence), a very nice touch. The
Marantz receiver has this too (Ken
Ishiwata of Marantz hates video being
on when audio is playing!). He’s right;
I often spot video breakthrough on
the test bench and, in my system,
switching all video and displays off
does make for a smoother sound.
Although the UK Region player
will play most Blu-ray discs, which
commonly lack regional coding, it will
not play U.S. DVDs, which are NTSC
as well as Region 1. Unrelated to the
zoning issue,
it will play
BDMV on
Verbatim
BD-Rs, I
found, and
Panasonic
BD-REs,
without a
hiccup.
VISION
Picture
quality
passed
all Silicon
Optix, High Quality Video tests with
ease, using both Blu-ray and DVD
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