Customer Reviews

Sony DVP-NC80V/B SACD DVD Changer, Black

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Thus far, I can offer up only two caveats: the DVPNC80V's less-than-perfect display and its limited random programming capability. As most of your settings will probably be handled via your monitor (assuming you're using the deck for video and not just audio playback), this isn't really a problem. Even though the onboard display needs to be pretty much at eye level to be seen clearly (as another reviewer noted), it is sufficient.

As for random or "shuffle" play -- and this is a big one, in my opinion -- Sony still doesn't get it; how can they produce a multi-disk deck that does so much so well and STILL refuse to offer the option of random play on all five disks??? Once again, you can only shuffle a single bay at a time. Fortunately (for me), I'm using this player primarily for video and SACD audio, without all that much need for random play (I have another changer that fills the bill in that respect). Still...

All in all, though, this is quite a remarkable unit -- especially at the price -- and is well worth considering if you're in the market for a "do-it-all" changer. Both sound and picture are superb, with a multitude of options, especially disk compatibility: a terrific value, really.

As other reviewers have pointed out this DVD changer is hard to beat for features and price. However, it's not perfect. I bought the 80V to replace a failing 3-year-old Sony 5-disc changer (the model number escapes me) and I'm slightly disappointed. The 80V has a terrible LED display -- it's dim and recessed, as if hiding in a cave, almost useless. This changer is also SLOW to turn on (it displays W-E-L-C-O-M-E slowly, letter by letter, each time you fire it up). And when you put in a DVD it takes much longer than my old Sony before it starts to play. You have to sit through a 20-30 second "Loading" message before the disc even starts. I can't knock the price or features, but after 3 months of trying to get used to it I'm looking for something better. My old Sony was much more responsive, so I don't know what they were thinking. Once the 80V gets going it's fantastic, but life is too short to waste on "Loading." :-)

This unit has so far surpassed all of my expectations. As the description states, it can truly support practically every format out on the market, including the coveted "DVD+R DL" (dual layer disc's 8.5gb's)& "DVD+RW". Other cool features include progressive scan & resume. Progressive scan means if your tv can support a higher viewing/picture clarity (as dvd's are intended to produce) this player can decode the signal to produce brilliant, vibrant, razor shap images. The one con that this unit doesn't have, is a built in dolby digital/dts decorder. No biggie tho.. As long as your receiver has one built in it, your all set. This unit pairs up magnificently to my Phillips 42 inch plasma (42pf9956/37) so much so, that my other previous units (2 panasonic& 1 jvc) pale in comparison.
Oh happy day.

I chose this for two of its features: the 5-disk changer that lets us watch different disks without having to get up to swap them in/out; and its ability to resume playing a movie after being turned off or using other disks. It does both of these very, very well.

The excellent sound and picture quality are not surprising, but that's because I also have the single-disk version of this player and knew what to expect. Otherwise, the A/V quality would have been a pleasant surprise.

Out of curiosity, I burned 100 MP3 albums to a DVD, using about 3.5GB of space. The unit plays them well, actually enhancing the sound beyond what I'd expect from MP3. The disk will play for a couple of days before having to repeat. A nice bonus.

One small omission: the unit can't list the disks that are in it, so unless you remember what they are and where, you have to try each one to see its contents. As other people have said, "Loading" is fairly slow, so a top-top menu should have been included.

Regarding the annoyingly bright blue and white lights: you can place black electrical tape over most of their surfaces, until you can see a sliver of the lights without being blinded by them. Also, they may turn off once a disk begins to play, depending on the disk's content.

The "resume" feature can be turned off in the menus, for people who don't want an "old" disk to restart in the middle. Of course, I think the ability to remember lots of disks is one of the unit's best features.

The unit's available in black or silver. Since it's rather large, black turned out to be better for us, because it's almost invisible when tucked into a rack of equipment.

We still have a Sony 5-disk CD changer from the 1980's. It still works (after almost 20 years), looks a lot like this DVD changer, but cost more than twice as much. It'll be nice if this DVD changer lasts that long.

This has been a really great DVD player and even played a roughly created cd of mp3's and jpg's i had put together, songs played while images changed on the tv.
Unfortunately, some 2-3 months after purchase, i now periodically get an E2700 Error that is not mentioned in the manual or anywhere on the sony site that i can find. The turn table stops working and the DVD player will either turn off and/or make some grinding noises inside. When talking to the very nice Sony tech support guy, he did not have any info on that particular error, but said that this DVD player was still under a 1 year warranty and i could return it for a refurbished one. I have to find the reciept first. Hopefully this is only a one time problem and all the other players are just fine.

First off, I don't have a TV. So, I could care less about the video or playback quality.

What I care about? Sound.

First off, this unit plays audio, whether it be commercial encodings or mp3s, off of CD, CD-R/W, DVD+R/W, DVD-R/W, SACD, and DVD-A (well, yeah, it's a DVD player...).

Why should you care? well, you've probably got a few gigs worth of mp3s from iTunes, or whatever, and maybe you've ripped a bunch of your commercial Audio CDs to mp3.. well.. maybe you might want to burn off all of it to one DVD-R. merely place it into the carrousel, and all 50 (up to 200 on one disc) albums are available. and they sound FANTASTIC.

Also, this unit outputs to either coaxial digital or digital optical. (Save the cash, and use the included RCA A/V cable as your coaxial digital cable.)

For the money, no other unit touches the feature list of this player. Comparing the other carousel units (Onkyo, Panasonic, ...) none of them STATE that they will play mp3 off of a DVD disc, and most don't even support both burnable dvd formats.

For me, there was NO QUESTION WHATSOEVER as to what unit would be the source for my audio system. I can pop in 5 DVDs of Mp3'd albums.. and have an all night party.

Issues:
The lcd is hard to see if you are close, and at a tight angle.. but, step back 6 feet and you can read it just fine, so, small potatoes.
The LCD display doesn't display the directory/file names while playing, on the 'track' number. (difficult unless you printout a list of directories on a data DVD/CD).

Notes:
You can replace discs during play by hitting 'exchange'. (wish people that reviewed stuff would read manuals before posting)
In Data disc mode, it counts jpgs as tracks, so keep that in mind when navigating with no video output.

I only give it 4 stars because it is still called a DVD player. Sony (or someone) should be smart and just make something called a media player... that should handle being a video source and a audio source.. and give decent hardware LCD output.. the last thing I want is a huge power-sucking tv having to be on to flip through some audio files on a disc.

Excellent picture, especially for the price. Very easy set up. Highly recommended.

I acquired this player to reduce the number of components in my living room. I was able to replace my 1997 vintage DVD player (A sony, which is still the best I've owned) and separate 5 disk CD changer with a single unit. And as a bonus I've finally got CD-MP3 which I thought would be great.

The unit is slow. It takes a very long time to boot up and an equally long time to "load" disks when you put in a new one or switch to a different one. There's also a noticeable delay from the time you press, say, the pause button to when the machine actually pauses. It's not enough to make you want to throw the unit in the garbage (that would be the front panel display) but it's really annoying if you're "upgrading" from a machine that responds instantly to every command.

I used to love Sony equipment, but now I've all but sworn it off (not to mention sworn at it). Over the years I've accumulated a lot of reasons why I'll never buy Sony again. (The 80v which I'm reviewing was a gift, BTW.) The latest is that the engineers at Sony are apparently in love with exceptionally bright blue LED's. I used to have an STR DE-915 which I pretty much loved (ok, liked) until it bit the dust. I replaced it with a newer Sony (I believe an STR DE-920) that lasted less than a day. I took it back because it had a super bright blue LED (that was HUGE) on the front, just to indicate it was on. Imagine someone standing off to the side in a movie theater and shining a flashlight in your eyes. It's annoying. I replaced that short-lived receiver with a nice Yamaha and have never looked back.

But the Sony 80v has that same problem. There are two super-bright LED's on the front. I believe one is white and the other is blue. They are incredibly distracting when trying to watch a movie. So I've covered them over with black electrical tape, and you could do the same. And that would reduce the annoying factor of this unit considerably.

But you can't cover the cryptically annoying onscreen menus with electrical tape, and they are truly awful. No words of English are included, and don't expect that the little icons will help you or make any sense at all. I could try to describe just how bad they are, but I really don't understand them.

The lack of usability extends to the CD-MP3 mode as well. It's got little icons under the track list that seem for the most part to correspond to keys on the remote, but there's also this arrow there for which there is no corresponding key. There's no apparent mechanism for queuing up tracks either.

I was also disappointed that it doesn't have a DVD-MP3 capability. To be fair, it doesn't advertise this capability. But to my thinking, it can play a data disk right? And DVD is just another type of disk. The engineering on this unit is stupid.

But I give this unit 3 stars, probably more than it deserves, but in the end, what I mainly use it for is to watch movies. And if that's what you want to do, you're not interested in continually tweaking the menus, and you've got a roll of black electrical tape, then this machine gets the job done.

CORRECTIONS AND AMPLIFICATIONS: It turns out that this unit will play a DVD-R data disk with MP3's. I must have confused it with another unit. Also, contrary to my statements above, there are a few words of English in the menu system. But the menu's are still fairly cryptic. They're also inaccessible in some cases when something's playing. So for example if you want to switch between 2 channel and multi-channel via the menu while playing an SACD, you have to stop playback before it let's you switch.

But what's really abysmal on this player are the MP3 Navigation and playback capabilities. The Navigation is confusing, but at the bottom of the menu screen, there's a hint: It shows icons for the arrow buttons (left, up, down, right) followed by an arrow, followed by an icon for the play button, a comma, an icon for the enter button, and a musical note. What does that mean? You could be forgiven for thinking that the left and right buttons navigate the folder structure on the disk. They actually page up and page down, but you wouldn't know that to look at the interface. And if you're really looking forward to being able to burn a few DVD's full of your favorite tunes and play them on your hi-fi without resorting to more specialized equipment, you'll get used to the navigation pretty quick.

But what you won't be doing is navigating around on that big DVD-R looking for the next tune, at least not while you're listening to a different one. Because while the machine lets you exit back to the parent folder (return button), if you navigate back down to a different "album" (ie. folder) it interrupts playback. Nor does it have an ability to "queue" a track to play after the current one. Oh yeah, and it doesn't have shuffle play either for data disks. It will let you repeat though, and there's a section in the manual devoted to the order in which your tracks will be played. If MP3 is your thing, you'd be better off hooking a PC into your stereo and using Media Monkey or a similar tool.

Also, on a data disk, there's a noticeable pause between tracks. Not a big deal in most cases, but if you're listening to an album where the tracks switch seamlessly (such as Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" or "The Wall"), the hitches between tracks can be really jarring.

On a brighter note, I listened to my first Super Audio CD (SACD) on this Sony tonight. (Dark Side of the Moon--Highly Reccommended. I had to patch the discrete 5.1 outputs on the player into the external decoder inputs on my receiver though, because 5.1 SACD is not output over the unit's optical/digital connection.) I could say it was amazing, but that really wouldn't be doing justice to it. But, uh, it was amazing! Be aware that it does not play DVD Audio though.

So the player is not all bad. If you really have low expectations, you'll probably love it. I guess it's a lot cheaper now than back when I acquired it. So if you're on a budget, this may be the player for you.

The Sony DVPNC80V was purchased to replace my aging DVD/receiver unit that was beginning to fuss. I ordered this new DVD player from Amazon and had it in less then a week. From first glance, the unit seemed of very sturdy construction and was surprisingly light for its size and features. Setup was very straight forward and easy to comprehend. Once completely setup, I popped in a DVD and although it took a couple seconds longer then other DVD players, playback was immediate and flawless. The unit can also be controlled by my SONY STR-DE598 remote with NO programming right out of the box!! So now I can control both with one remote, much to my wife's delight. All in all, this is an excellent unit for its price, especially being able to utilize 5 discs in the carousel and MP3 playback. I have not found one movie that has been backed up that will not play. I would reccommend this unit to anyone!

im the type of person whos not gonna buy a brand new item if i can get it used for half the price n it works just as well with only a few unnoticeable blemishes on the appearance.

this sony player has great audio / video quality (esp. w/ s-video), lots of features as u all know, and also... HUGE! i was surprised when i first saw it. its twice as thick as our old sony single disc n longer too, bigger than our cable box. but thats not really a big negative... maybe changers are all like that

love this player = )