What do you get when you take a pretty decent Oppo $500 Blu-Ray player, strip off the black metal case, and then drop the entire thing (chassis and all) into a slightly fancier silver metal case with a different logo on it? Lexicon, apparently, thinks that you get a $3500 Blu-Ray player. After noticing some similarities between the front and back layouts of the Oppo BDP-83 and the Lexicon BD-30, Audioholics tore them both open to check and see what was going on inside:

As far as we could determine, Lexicon didn’t change a single thing in terms of the hardware. Heck, they didn’t even lift the boards out of the chassis, opting instead to cut out the bottom of their own chassis to accommodate the venting locations, and putting a darker blue filter over the Oppo’s VFD display to give it a slightly deeper hue.

But wait, the Lexicon BD-30 is THX certified and the Oppo BDP-83 isn’t, so they must have done something to it, right?

…Right?

Or, it could be that the BD-30 actually fails the basic THX audio certification, and since Audioholics pointed that out to THX and Lexicon, all of the branding and mentions of the BD-30 being THX certified disappeared from the THX and Lexicon websites.

I can’t say that this kind of thing surprises me, but it does make me wonder just how many mid to high end electronics out there are just slightly modified and dressed up versions of basic units… All the more reason to do your research before you plunk down a whole bunch of money for something that may just be a budget model in disguise.

[ Audioholics ] VIA [ Slashdot ]