The Sony BDP-CX7000ES MegaChanger really is a megachanger, capable of housing 400 of your favorite Blu-ray discs, DVDs, or CDs. While Sony’s site boasts that the BDP-CX7000ES allows “you to free up valuable shelf space and relocate all your discs to one convenient, easy-to-access location,” it seems to me that that partially defeats the purpose of owning such a collection. See, part of the joy of possessing all those titles is the ability to admire the cover, check the release date, see which studios/production companies backed it, see who starred in it, and… (Oops, the MegaChanger lets you browse by jacket art, title, director, cast, genre, and other more). Well, you still can’t smell the ink through your TV and besides, there’s just something about holding a tangible product in your hand.
More to the point, however, I never saw the appeal of having a multi-disc player, CD, DVD, Blu-ray, cartridge or carousel, or otherwise. I always found them slow or noisy, and often repetitive (looping the same songs when it should have been more random). Maybe that was just my Kenwood CD changer. Still, I opted for the single tray about 98 percent of the time.
The Sony BDP-CX7000ES MegaChanger is a bit of a confused product; while it seems to be shooting for the “press-play” demographic, it tries to keep pace with advancing technology by offering features that appeal to the tech-minded. Unfortunately, Sony dropped the ball with a couple of features that should have found their way onto the BDP-CX7000ES MegaChanger – such as Wi-Fi, onboard memory for BD-Live (you have to have a BD-Live enabled Blu-ray Disc, USB flash memory, and Internet connection for that to work) or support for DLNA.
It’ll be up to you to decide whether or not the Sony BDP-CX7000ES MegaChanger is for you after you read the specs below; I’m on the fence with this one.
Undressing the Sony BDP-CX7000ES MegaChanger
This 400-disc MegaChanger comes with standard Blu-ray player features like Profile 2.0 compatibility and onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, plus it comes with 7.1 channel analog output, an RS-232 port to allow for audio/video control and integration into custom installed systems, IR inputs and outputs, and Sony’s Super Bit Mapping and HD Reality Enhancer (for upstepping 8bits to 14bits).
The Megachanger uses the XMB interface, as seen on the PLAYSTATION 3, and features DVD up scaling via HDMI, full HD 1080p, Dolby True HD and DTS-MA audio decoding, 24p True Cinema, and much more.
All this is available for a mind-blowing $1,900; however, are the features and capacity worth the design oversights at this price point?
