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Don't hate Oppo's support when you throw away the Asus unit in frustration lol. Plus, I'm still playing region-free discs (i.e. true universal), streaming 1080p with DTS-HD MA .MKVs, ISO's from USB and SACD. How's that going for ya?
Why would the Asus be frustrating you feel?
Had mine for a few days and tried it´s capabilities.
Build quality: Night and day the BDS-700 feel so much more solid. I am not of the school thinner and smaller is better. BDS-700 has real weight to it and a full sized PSU and gold plated connectors and a case that don´t budge when you lift it. Just gives a much nicer impressions but haven´t popped the hood. BDT320 has a remote control which actually look and feels like quality but remote controls are dispensables blurayplayers aren´t in the same way. I would have enjoyed if my 1400$ oppo bd85SE had build quality like that.
Regarding PQ as I suspected hard to beat something that is so close to my preferences. BDS-700 is on thesame high level though.I feel it´s entirely preferences more or less that make me ever so slightly preferr the BDT320 in comparisons. I can´t really pick out that the BDS-700 is inaccurate in any way as is so easy with the PS3 and Sony BDP-S370. The BDS-700 do come across as a bit drier and the BDT-320 somehow is better at giving the illusion of depth and maybe slightly richer colours. In 2D but particularly for 3D however 3D requires more calibration so maybe don´t have found the exact right settings for the BDS-700 yet. Overall they seem to do well on roughly equal settings. On the BDS-700 I do push the colours a bit more to the green side to counter a red push I sometimes see in skin tones but it´s small adjustments and doesn´t mean the BDT320 necessarily is more accurate just with my televison of course. Ran TT3D and Hugo 3D for bluray 3D. Hugo 3D is one of the better non animated 3D movies I looked at highly recommended.
Ran Scorpions Acoustica while trying the DVD upscaling and noise reductions apart from the sound. Overall impressions was similar to bluray. Upscaling seem to be roughly equal however I am not to sold of Qdeos noise reduction algorithms. My Onkyo 709 uses Qdeo but like the BDS-700 it introduce more visible artifacts on the microphone stands while panning then Panasonics noise filter introduced. Now this DVD is of relatively high quality so will see if I encounter something particularly bad where these noise filters become really usable. For me 9,5x out of 10 I preferr the picture with some noise in the end due to less introduced artifacts. Both the Panasonic and Asus BDS-700 seem more focused on giving you all the detail from the images rather then softening and making them more forgiving. Sony BDP-S370 is quite good at that but sadly it´s colour errors are just to big with big bluish tints and uneven picture so it´s more or less collecting dust. Good for the occasional SACD record though
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Very happy on that side.
Sound: Here it´s certainly a step up over the BDT320. BDT320 is not awful by any means but the BDS-700 is just that cleaner and offer more resolution. Compares nicely to my Audio GD Reference 9 and may even be preferrable over the NFB10SE as I see it. Comes with an equalizer but only listened to it in bypass mode. To bad it don´t have analogue channels for surround just stereo.
Noise levels: Again better then the BDT320. The solid build quality and case work seem to pay off. Escept for lower noise floor there is also a complete lack of higher frequencies. the BDT320 on standby mostly do have somewhat of a buzz similar to plasma for those that is familiar with that. Not that loud but highly annoying and audible from 6 feet away. Quieter during playback so it´s not much of an issue when actually playing music or such. But the BDS-700 is unaudible for cd playback and I have never ever noticed it while watching dvds or blurays.
File support. I am old fashioned I discovered DLNA 2 days ago. Haven´t had much success with the BDT320 music files including FLAC works with serviio but that´s about it. Asus BDS-700 accept both allshare which I preferr and serviio. It plays mkvs, mpg and isos with menues flawlessly (as long as my wifi connection is stable enough that is). No problem with usb playback so far either. I haven´t tried any bluray 3D ISOs since I don´t have any bluray burner but it´s the last player to be licensed without cinavia and if Asus don´t cave like Oppo did this should also be no problem.
It´s also region free though currently don´t have any RegA discs to test how well that works. It´s useful because we often get nerfed releases over here.
General operation. I love the interface of the BDS-700 as much as I hate BDT320 interface. The Asus remote while looking cheap in comparison to the rest of the package scores high in functionality. The remote layout make it easy to find the buttons even without the backlight and just about anything you need for playback is one button push away or max two with no need to get into thick menues.. On the BDT320 with it´s touch pad remote it´s a nightmare searching in chapters and if I want to change subtitles or picture settings you need up to 10 button macros. For music operation you have to enable high clarity sound twice for unknown reason on the BDT320. Just not pleasant at all to work with and I do believe the touch pad will be removed in the next line up since nobody likes it. They did remove the touch sensor from the previous 2010 310 which is beyond me. That was actually useful in dark environments.
Not that big fan of Sonys X-bar in the Sony BDP-S370 and PS3 either where I so far can´t really find any improvements possible for the Asus. Only quirk I found so far is for some compressed formats like ISOs I had to manually disable 24p to get it running at the NTSC or PAL refresh rates but other then that it´s minimal dwelving in minutes to get to do what you want.
So far a lot of like and it´s nicely future proofed without Cinavia. Really hope Asus don´t cave like Oppo and introduce Cinavia with future firmwares. They got the license before so nobody can force them. It´s also region free. Particularly useful over here since we often get nerfed releases.
To sum it up I am very satisfied with it. Surely getting a lot for the money.
