Review Details

ARIES Home Wireless HD Video Digital Transmitter & Receiver

Product Rating:

Product Review (submitted on October 27, 2015):

I purchased this item after carefully researching and

weighing all the available options for HDMI transmission over

the large distance in our theatre. Those included Dual Cat 6e

Baluns, Fiber-Optic Convertors, and Wireless HDMI

transmitter/receiver pairs. I would warn anyone trying to use

the first option in a public theatre because the cable length

limitation (usually only 100') is just not long enough if you

want the Blu-Ray/DVD player located on the stage or

projection booth with the projector suspended in the ceiling

typically in a 1000 to 3000 seat venue for front projection.

In addition, those cables cannot be run parallel to AC lines

or in a high RF environment (such as a place where many

lighting dimmer circuits are used, well DUH, it's a theatre

and that's the normal lighting usage) and it states that

quite clearly in the manual.

Our projector is hung from a balcony rail with lots of AC

runs on it and the Cat 6e Balun didn't work AT ALL despite

having both Cat 6e runs of identical length, using high

quality well-terminated ends, and avoiding AC lines. I looked

into a Fiber-Optic convertor interface. At almost $1,200, it

was just too expensive.

Enter the Nyrius Aries NAVS500 unit. At $200 it seemed like a

good (reasonably) affordable choice... if it worked. After

reading all the reviews, I decided to give it a try. I wasn't

disappointed. Many of the negative reviews cited the unit not

working right out of the box. That's fair enough. It seems

like a quality-control issue at worst. The company should

work on that. I was able to purchase a refurbished unit at a

discount so I figured it had been gone over and tested

thoroughly before I got it.

I initially hooked up my top-of-the-line Oppo Digital BP-83

Blu-Ray player (which normally syncs perfectly to my HD home

theatre projector) and it didn't work! The Sanyo XL-FP42 (8K

Lumen) projector displayed a sync rate of 480P with a nasty

stripe through the middle of an unwatchable picture. I was

crestfallen until I discovered much later why that had

happened. My co-worker had a much cheaper Samsung Blu-Ray

(around $300) and it was able to sync at 720P. We were making

progress but still not quite at our goal of 1080i, the

projector's highest supported rate.

Just for giggles we hooked up the theatre's very cheap ($150)

Samsung Blu-Ray player and to our surprise and delight, the

projector synched to it INSTANTLY at 1080i! We couldn't

believe it. We played an entire movie and the link never

failed or lost sync once. It was incredible and ironic. The

cheapest player performed the best!

At first we decided to place that Blu-Ray player within 25'

of the projector with no obstructions. When we got the el

cheapo Samsung player to sync, we moved it to the stage where

we normally set it up (through a much lower-res interface).

This is an as-the-crow-flies distance of approximately 90'

with a big CONCRETE AND STEEL proscenium wall in the direct

line-of-sight between them. We fired everything up and it

again synched at 1080i and stayed there with no glitches.

Unbelievable!

We then decided to go for broke. I had the head electrician

fire up EVERY lighting circuit dimmer in the building.

Several hundred RF-pumping, EMF-saturating, mega-

interference-generating AC runs soaked the ether. The picture

looked perfect and stayed that way despite our constantly

changing the levels of the lights in an attempt to disrupt

the link.

We were ready to use it for a real show. The next week we

tested everything successfully and a few days later we used

the Nyrius ARIES NAVS500 for a live event where a movie was

the centerpiece. It worked perfectly and we are now

cautiously confident that we've got a winner. I will update

this review as we do more shows (we don't use the projector

on a daily or even weekly basis), so stay tuned.

I suspect (but haven't fully tested the hypothesis) that the

synching protocol between Blu-Ray players and the Nyrius

ARIES NAVS500 differs greatly from player to player. I want

to set my Oppo Blu-Ray to 1080i instead of "Auto" and see if

I can get it to sync at that rate. I also would like to do

the same with my co-worker's mid-priced Samsung Blu-Ray. And

I would like to test a few other players for good measure. I

will perform these experiments soon and revise this review

accordingly. I would HIGHLY recommend anyone using this unit

in a public theatre to have several Blu-Ray players on hand

because of this issue. In addition, I would use the shortest

possible HDMI cables to get into and out of the Nyrius units.

That's just good practice.

This unit gets two enthusiastic thumbs up from me despite it

not working with two out of three players we tested it with.

That question will be resolved one way or another. Here is

some last advice: Turn on the receiver FIRST, then turn on

the transmitter, then the Blu-Ray, and finally turn on the

projector. Do not disconnect the HDMI connection when it has

synched because it may not re-synch. If you do happen to

disconnect it, power down the transmitter, hook the HDMI back

up and power the transmitter back up again. That solved it

for me.

Thanks for making a good workable unit Nyrius!
- Verified purchase from Nyrius trusted store. -