A silly sentence in Monday’s post had a few people ask me why it wasn’t possible to just play audio CDs on the ASUS O!Play BDS-700 instead of having to undergo the rigmarole of turning on the TV first. So, first off, sorry! You really don’t have to turn on the TV and playing audio CDs couldn’t be simpler.
My original sentence was really just to emphasise how cool it is to have a remote control in your smartphone so you could also control audio from the kitchen without the TV or included BDS-700 remote control.
It seemed, therefore, appropriate for me to go into more detail about this feature and how well it really works. First off I had to locate one of my Christmas CDs. Obviously this test cannot be done without Christmas music as the silly season is right around the corner.
It was as easy as ASUS suggested. Turn on the unit, put the CD into the disc tray, wait until it recognises the disc and says CD on the display, press Play. Done. Now my system is not set up in the standard way in that the O!Play BDS-700 is directly plugged into the TV at the moment, we have been shuffling our speakers around and sorting out our various players so they run through the speakers but it isn’t done yet. So I have to turn my TV on for sound.
This isn’t an issue for those of you whose systems are routed through your sound system though.
The ASUS O!Play BDS-700 media player has a variety of different audio options which I’ll talk you through today. HDMI output is the default setting which you can amend by simply going to Settings on the Home menu.
SPDIF output – if your audio output device supports the pass through function you can choose the Primary Pass Through option. You can also transform audio to DTS raw data for TV/AV receivers or devices with SPDIF output.
The PCM stereo option for two-channel digital stereo decoders is set to default and you can choose from three PCM output rate limits (coaxial/optical) that include 48KHz, 96 KHz and 192 KHz. You are also given the option to choose from four different speaker channel setups, such as 7.1 or 2.1.
Two other features worth mentioning are the Music Mode option and Neo6. The former does require you go into Settings>>Audio>>Music Mode in order to allocate it a style. These include Rock, Classic, Jazz, Bypass and User Defined. Selecting User Defined will give you access to an equalizer menu which you can then tune to suit.
Neo6 outputs simulated multichannel sound from two channel sources using the HDMI Out jack. Great for when you are forced to endure the pain of two channels when in the process of redesigning the tech in your house. Like we are… Enable this feature by going into the Audio Settings menu exactly the same way as for Music Mode above.
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