At long last I got to spend a good couple of hours last night with the BDP-2 and BDA-2, I haven’ compared with the original versions yet, I’ve got someone coming in today who wants to try this so we will report back later.
Basically I compared an attached HDD to the internal SSD with the same rips and also AES vs USB from the BDP-2 into the BDA-2, so with the USB connection you are by-passing the sound card in the BDP-2.
Firstly, as expected, reading from a SSD is definitely superior to reading from a HDD with moving parts, you just get a much tighter, cleaner presentation, it is much the same as reading from a USB thumb Drive in reality but it is just a fantastic option to be able to install a large drive internally and access it over the network, I found that 500GB has easily taken all the music I want to listen to at the moment but in the future a 1TB drive will be perfect.
Then I compared the AES-EBU against USB, firstly both sounded pretty amazing but I was constantly drawn to the USB connection, to me it just sounded a little more focused and refined, on the trailing edge of notes there seemed less overhang with everything gaining a little more space, we are only talking small margins here but on every track I tried USB seemed go give the most pleasing presentation, it actually seemed more noticeable on busier tracks like rock or recordings that were not the best. I guess this would make sense really as via USB the data is being transferred directly to DAC with nothing else getting in the way.
Either way though, the combination of the BDP-2/BDA-2 is a pretty stunning combination
