OTHER TECH

PERFORMANCE

Before watching anything through the HDP100, I wanted to establish a reference point for my evaluation, in this case a direct HDMI connection to my Pioneer Elite Plasma. I watched a variety of test patterns and Blu-ray content and took note of specific scenes that could cause problems.

The first thing I noticed after switching over to the HDP100 was a lot of noise and "crawlies" around the text in my Blu-ray player's menu. Where this screen was razor sharp and noise free when directly connected, it was noticeably less so when running through the HDP100 system. Undaunted, I threw in was Pixar's Cars Blu-ray. This film has great color, gobs of detail and is fun to watch so it seemed like a good starting point. Where the animation was smooth and lifelike when directly connected, something didn't look right when running through the HDP100. On horizontal pans, the image got choppy like it was running at 7/8 speed or something. And while the picture never completely dropped out, it had a stuttery look reminiscent of a bad case of motion-blur on an LCD set or like it was dropping a large number of frames.

I pulled Cars and tossed in several test discs to look at patterns that I'd viewed earlier. Sure enough, almost anything that had horizontal pans exhibited this weird motion artifact like film judder on steroids. Fine detail was also destroyed during movement. One test clip showed pages of a book, and the words smeared into an unreadable blob once the camera started moving. Again, having just watched these scenes moments before using the same player, TV and cables, the blame could only point to the HDP100.

I continued playing around with connections and settings and just couldn't get an image that was even watchable. I called Acoustic Research and described what I was seeing, and they deduced that I was having a bandwidth issue created by noise on my power lines. Counter to the written instructions, they recommended plugging the components into a surge protector. Sure enough, that cleared up the images considerably, taking the video quality from totally unwatchable to just irritating.

When I described my rather elaborate system, which includes two fairly significant power conditioners, they felt that these might be back feeding noise to the power lines, and that I should connect the system to an electrical circuit in another room. So, armed with a 100-foot extension cord, I connected the devices to an outlet on the other side of my house. While this didn't completely eliminate the motion artifacts, it greatly reduced them. They were only really noticeable on slow pans, where the image occasionally had a single stutter. The only place where it was noticeably distracting was on scrolling text where it had a herky-jerky motion. In fact, most casual viewers might not have noticed the glitching.

However, the noise in the image wasn't totally eliminated. Again, it didn't detract from viewing and probably wouldn't be apparent to many viewers, but it was there, and most noticeable around text. The edges of objects had halos containing crawlies and other small bits of distortion that was non-existent on the direct connection. There were also some banding issues when solid blocks of colors transitioned to different shades.

BOTTOM LINE

Even with the issues that I experienced, I have to applaud Acoustic Research for bringing the HDP100 to market. HDMI is a moving target that is capable of carrying a staggering amount of data, and trying to send it over power lines is no easy feat.

Based on my experience, this is a difficult system to recommend. You probably don't know how your electrical system is wired and you'll have no idea how the system will react to the power lines in your home until it is installed. And the ultimate solution in my home - using a 100-foot extension cord - is clearly impractical in the real world.

At the end of the day, you're definitely better off running an HDMI cable between your components if that is an option. If not, the HDP100 offers a workable solution, provided you can return it if your results are disappointing. S&V