Cambridge Audio DVD57

The Cambridge Audio DVD57 is an excellent machine with good picture and sound quality and plenty of features for the enthusiast. Haven't had the opportunity to try the progressive scan feature yet, as TV not compatible.

buy this Cambridge Audio DVD57 as a cheap way of upgrading your cd player and getting a dvd player thrown in...£145 at richer

the audio side got excellent reviews in hi fi mags

I bought my Cambridge Audio DVD57 only 4 or 5 months ago from Richer Sounds. I generally read a lot of reviews before buying anything and had noticed that not many were favourable towards it. However i liked the look of it and it was on sale for a good price, so i bought it.

What a bad mistake that was !! I was already using a Toshibe 210E, which although is a budget machine, its picture quality and sound were superb. However it had become a bit 'clunky' looking, it was 2 years old and i wanted to upgrade to something more modern.

The DVD57 has a number of issues that i just can't get over. Firstly the sound quality. I found that it was very quiet and that i was having to turn my Amplifier up a lot further than when i used the Toshiba. Also the centre channel on the 5.1 system was very quiet, with human voices being drowned out by the front left and right channels. I tried to adjust my speaker set-up for this but without much success. I run a Denon AV amplifier with a set of Bose Speakers and the sound quality for all my other Home cinema and Hi-Fi equipment is excellent, however they were probably too good for the DVD57 and it showed its true colours.

Secondly the picture quality was far from being any better than my old Toshiba. Infact dark colours were very grainy and almost appeared to be pixelating. Human faces were also very poor. General colours were okay but were a little flat.I watch TV on a Sony CRT so don't use the progressive scan, however i don't think i would want to. I honestly don't think the picture quality is any better than that of my old Sony Video recorder.

Thirdly i have a real problem with picture lag when playing DVD's. Generally as we all are aware by now there are 1 or two points in the film where the picture stops for a milli-second before continuing, generally when the film starts a new layer. When watching a film on the DVD57 i get far more. Infact i recently watched ALIEN, which plays fine on the Toshiba and counted over 50. At one point Sigourney Weaver went up the same ladder 3 times in about 2 seconds which was very reminiscent of a 'Benny Hill' Chase !

Finally the 'Zoom' facility has the annoying habit of leaving its icon on the screen when you use it. The Icon then stays there for the entire film unless you revert back to its original picture. Even really cheap budget players don't do this.

I have other gripes such as a lot of the catagories on the menu actually do the opposite of what they say. For example if you want to cange what format you want to watch the film in and press 4:3 you get 16:9 and vice versa. I think someone was having an off day at the factory when they wrote the software for it.

Anyway on the plus side, it is a nice looking machine, the case appears well built, its very quiet when watching a film, the display has a cool blue colour to it and the remote is very small and easy to use. Also they are now only £149-00 at Richer Sounds, however to be honest i think it should be priced at the sub £100 level.

However i would not recommend this to anybody and am actually going back to my old Toshiba until i can find something else to replace the DVD57 with. Anybody want to buy one going cheap ?

Finaly bit the bullet and got one of these even though it had not got an overall good rating from different sources.I found that after a few niggles with the first machine(which was one of the early versions). I exchanged it and now everything is great. I have the version 3 machine which they have brought out and it plays everything that I have trown at it bar DIVx discs. Did some research on it and found that it is produced here in the Uk the case comes from Sampo of china the drive mechanics are from ASATECH who produce stuff for Toshiba, Philips, Sony and some other leading brands the Video chip is an optitec OP2001GE the Dac is a crystal CS4360 + Pink triangle.The connectos are gold throughout, super quiet and running smooth I would recommend this machine to anyone with one reservation make sure you get the version3 upwards witch has been re-deigned inside and you get the slim dayglow remote as the new remote requires a disc patch to work anyway the slimeline one is a lot better you can see all the controls in a darkened room.

This machine wasn't my first choice of machine and was a replacement for a faulty Limit DVD9900SE. I had a choice at the same price between this machine and the Toshiba SD-520E and concidering that the latter machine can only do progressive scan in NTSC mode and this one can do it in PAL as well, this was to obvious choice.

It should be noted that although the people in Richer Sounds said that they hadn't had any returns of the machines previously, the first machine they gave me and all the others of that batch in their store room were faulty and didn't work at all. I took their review machine as I'd seen that it was working. It should also be noted that when no connections are plugged into the back, the metal casing is live at 120 volts AC! Maybe there's an earthing problem on the PSU.

Anyway, now onto the actual player's features and how well it does them. It can play DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, CD, MP3 and JPEG. I haven't got any DVD-Audio discs so I can't say how well it plays them, however, it does all the others very well indeed.

The audio output from the 5+1 outputs through my Technics EH750 Hifi is exceptional. When playing CDs it sounds far better than from the internal CD player. I guess this is due to its designers' audio system pedigree. Similarly, Dolby Digital output sounds excellent too with a full range of frequencies.

Visually, the display is sharp, with good definition and only a hint of banding on gradational colours.

Control of the system is a little tardy. Pressing the pause or other control button may not be noticed by the machine for up to a couple of seconds. This isn't really a major problem though.

The only real demerit for this player I've found is that it doesn't have full SCART control. That is, it can't tell the TV to change into 16:9 mode or 4:3. This was rather annoying as even the really cheap players can usually do this. Instead I had to fuble around the TV's settings to tell it to go widescreen.

The remote control is, in my opinion, nice and small. It's wafer thin, uses a coin battery (supplied) and has glow in the dark buttons. The only gripe I have with it is that the buttons are rigidly in a rectangular pattern and not that well laid out.

Overall, it's an excellent player for the money, assuming that (a) you get one which works, and (b) you plug in the connections at the back before switching on so you don't have the case live, and (c) you don't mind manually switching from 4:3 to 16:9 and back again.