For anyone who missed my last benchmark of a Pioneer Elite DVD player (DV-59AVi), let’s just say I did a big turn around in my overall opinion of Pioneer’s flagship DVD players. Their past offerings left a lot to be desired, and even worse, there are a lot of companies out there using them as a starting point for their platforms with little or no improvement in the video processing department.
The new DV-79AVi replaces the 59AVi in the line-up and includes some new features that were lacking in the 59AVi, namely, support for HDMI v1.1 which brings DVD-Audio and high resolution multi-channel PCM support over HDMI. The Pioneer line already offered a digital interconnect for high resolution material via Firewire, but this is only useful if you have a processor or receiver that supports it. Most of Pioneer’s Elite line has support, but many surround sound processors out there don’t. I still haven’t figured out why companies don’t generally offer this feature on their surround sound processors since this represents state of the art technology.
The 79Avi also improves on the 59AVi in the build and looks department. While it still doesn’t have the overall build integrity of players like Onkyo’s SP-1000 or Denon’s DVD 5910, it is by far the best looking and heftiest player in the Pioneer Elite line. The 79AVi is available in both silver and black and features a very elegant face and a well rounded back panel that compliments just about every kind of video and audio connection on the market today.
When I tested the 59AVi, I was extremely impressed with how much Pioneer had improved its proprietary Pure Cinema video processing. Their de-interlacing capability was improved to the point of being almost a match for the popular Faroudja and Silicon Image solutions. The 79AVi doesn’t seem to be exactly the same as the 59AVi and actually falls behind slightly, which was surprising to say the least.
When I first started testing the 79AVi, I immediately noticed a problem that I had never seen in a DVD player before. For our cadence testing, we use several test patterns from Microsoft’s Hardware Quality Labs DVD. These test patterns consist of a vertical and horizontal resolution wedge revolving in a clockwise motion and have different progressive flags at different points along the circle. When I began the tests, I immediately started to see some moiré in the vertical resolution wedge as the pattern went near the 90 degree mark in the circle. As the wedge continued on, it essentially came out of film mode and all vertical resolution was lost until about 240 degrees. The weirdest thing about it was, the wedge wasn’t dropping out of film mode consistently but rather fading in and out at different points. I tried this test in all of the different de-interlacing modes, and each one showed the same thing (except Pure Cinema Off which doesn’t ever lock into film mode anyway). In further investigation, I popped in AVIA Pro and used their cadence tests to see how the player would react. Again, I was treated to some new issues that I couldn’t reproduce with any other player or video processor I had on hand. As the resolution wedges on the AVIA Pro pattern moved toward the right side of the screen, there was some obvious interference going on in the extreme right side of the wedge. As the wedge moved faster, it got worse, and the problem faded in and out at a very specific point. When the pattern switched to moving vertically the player would not hold horizontal resolution at all. This problem went away completely if I set the HDMI output to 480i and used an outboard video processor, confirming that this was indeed an issue with Pioneer’s internal video processing.
I commented on this at the popular Audio/Video Science Forum and got some interesting reports back. Dale Adams of Anchor Bay Technologies (creators of DVDO) offered some suggestions of what might be wrong. He thought it might be a high detail issue. With this infomation, I went back and tried more tests using some other test patterns I had on hand. The player seemed to do fine with the familiar stuff like the race car sequence from Super Speedway. I also tried a clip from The Killer that is known for high detail issues, and the player did fine. I then moved on to a small clip from Gladiator that is a panning sequence over the city of Rome. This scene is a bit of a torture test for a lot of DVD players. Sure enough, the 79AVi showed obvious issues, including moiré as well as digital artifacts that I had never seen before.
Shortly after this, a member of the AVS forum offered to bring his player over to my house to ensure that the problem wasn’t in fact a defective player. His player showed the exact same issues. A few of the other members of AVS started experimenting with different settings over the next few days while I was off doing other things. One of the members found that the artifacts seemed to go away if he set Pioneer’s Progressive Motion setting to “Slow”. When I got the player hooked up the next time, I tried this out and sure enough, it fixed the problem. I didn’t see any more issues with the revolving wedge patterns and the digital artifacts in the Gladiator sequence disappeared. The player still has issues with vertical motion with high detail though. This was readily apparent with the test patterns on AVIA Pro as well as the roof tops with the Gladiator sequence. I re-checked these scenes with my reference Denon DVD-5910, and it didn’t have any problems with these tests.
Unfortunately, I do not have access to a DV-59AVi anymore to see if it has the same artifacts. I was not using AVIA Pro at the time I was testing the 59AVi, so there really isn’t any way that I would have seen the same things when I tested it.
So, as of right now I recommend that anyone using this player set the progressive motion setting to “Slow” to ensure that you won’t run into the above mentioned problems. This is only a stop gap in my opinion and I hope that Pioneer will look into the issue and resolve it, as it was not a problem with the previously tested 59AVi, or any other player I’ve tested for that matter.
Moving on from that to our typical batch of tests, the 79AVi did quite well. Like the 59AVi, I recommend using the Auto 2 setting for progressive playback regardless of the output or resolution used. This mode passes all of our tests with the exception of our “Bad Edit” test. For some reason, I could not get this player to pass that test regardless of the de-interlacing mode. This was another peculiar issue, since the 59AVi passed this test.
The core performance of this player was a bit of a mixed bag. The 79AVi offers several output resolutions using its HDMI output, including 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i. The inclusion of 480i makes this player a likely candidate as a digital transport for a standalone video processor that may offer better performance. Some of the key things to look for when shopping for a digital transport are pixel cropping, CUE performance, and usability (speed of navigation and layer change). You also want to be sure the player doesn’t have any Y/C delay issues. Unfortunately the 79AVi has issues in almost all of these categories.
Using the chroma test patterns from the newest Microsoft test disc (Test Annex 3), the player did not pass 3 of the 4 tests. When I fed it an alternating 3-2 cadence pattern, there was obvious flickering in the chroma channels that lends to a distracting image that seems very unstable. Moving on to the 2-2 test pattern revealed a slight amount of CUE issues that were verified using the DVDO VP-30 video processor. Using its AutoCUE-C™ feature, I could see a slight amount of banding in the pattern disappear and re-appear as I toggled the feature off and on. While the issue is only minor in comparison to Pioneer’s former players, it was still there. Moving on to the 4:2:0 ICP test, the image looked quite bad. It had a very interlaced look to it, with all of the red displaying obvious tearing with both still images and motion. DVDO’s chroma correction feature did fix the 2-2 issue, but the ICP performance was so bad that the DVDO couldn’t mask the entire artifact. Given how good the chroma filtering is in the DVDO, I don’t expect any other processor out there to do any better. This should be taken into consideration for those who are sensitive to these visible problems.
Using both the HDMI and component video outputs the 79AVi suffers from about 1-pixel of Y/C delay. Pioneer has included an adjustment for chroma delay, but it adjusts in almost 2-pixel increments which is not nearly fine enough to help with this issue. The player doesn’t really have any issues with pixel cropping though. All of the resolutions showed 2-pixels missing from the bottom of the image and while no pixel cropping at all is preferred, this would still be out of the active frame with most material.
The 79AVi passes below black information using its component output, but its default white level is too high and measured in at 103 IRE. The HDMI output has four different selections for color space if you are using the HDMI output to an HDMI display, and two different options if you connect to a DVI-based display. On the HDMI side, you have RBG, Full Range RGB, Component (4:4:4 YCbCr), and 12-bit Component (4:2:2 YCbCr). If you connect to a DVI display, you can only select the two RGB options. All of these selections offer the correct Studio RGB levels with black at digital 16 and white at digital 235, preserving the full dynamic range of the intended video signal, except Full Range RGB. This mode uses the PC RGB levels moving black to digital 0 and white to digital 255. This clips the head and toe room of the video signal and does not preserve its intended dynamic range.
From a usability standpoint the 79AVi is slightly above average. The player navigates pretty quickly but can be a tad sluggish in its set-up menus. Menu navigation is good though, as are load times. The layer change is too slow in my opinion, and clocked in at roughly 1.5 seconds using our high bit rate test. I would prefer to see player’s measure in at less than a second or even better seamlessly.
In terms of features, the 79AVi is one of the best players out there. The audio suite is excellent, with full support of iLink, HDMI 1.1, DVD-Audio, and SACD. This is one of only a handful of players on the market right now offering these features. The audio set-up options are also quite good, but the player lacks the option to do time alignment for DSD-based material. This is unfortunate, since time alignment is an important feature for multi-channel playback. Since most people don’t have the flexibility to place all of their speakers equidistant from the main listening position, the player must compensate for the differences in placement so that phase is accurate. Most players require the DSD information to be converted to PCM for this application, but Pioneer does not allow for this. This is really the only drawback that I could see on the audio side. Keep in mind though, that if you are using the Firewire output for SACD, the receiver or processor may offer time alignment for the signal, which would make this a non-issue.
Conclusions
I must say that I was a bit more impressed with the Pioneer Elite 59AVi than the 79AVi, overall. The 79AVi does offer some new features that I was happy to see (10 bit processing, HDMI v1.1 support), but I think the player took a bit of a step backwards in terms of video processing performance and core performance. If you already own the 59AVi, I would have to suggest sticking with it if you are getting anxious to upgrade. If you are in the market for a new player and have these two in mind you should consider the pros and cons of both before deciding. Some of the things I’ve mentioned here won’t immediately pop out at you, and some people may not even notice them. In general, the 79AVi is still an excellent DVD player, but with just a bit of fine tuning, Pioneer could have achieved an almost best-in-class rating. Hopefully, they will do some testing and provide a firmware update. If they do, you can be sure we will re-test the player and report on it.
