Listening and Looking
Nowadays products are required to have a high level of ‘plug-and-play’. If you take pictures during your holiday, you can immediately put them in the UD8004 to look at them. Formats such as AVCHD and JPEG are no hassle for the Marantz. The advantage is that your beloved pictures and movies are reproduced with the greatest care possible. Super! Often universal players have limited quality when using them as a cd-player. Marantz takes great care of audio. And it shows. Probably dedicated cd-players of about 2 500 euro will produce better quality, but that doesn’t matter. You spend the same amount of money, but are only able to play CD’s. Take this into consideration when purchasing. A lot depends on how you use the player. Do you use the HDMI-output and have your processor do the conversion, or do you use the analog outputs, having the player’s DACs do the work?
In the test setup the HDMI connection to the Marantz AV8003 gave the best result. The same thing can be said of sound quality with SACDs and Blu-Rays with multiple channels. The final performance level is to me clearly dependant of the chain of equipment behind the player. The sound is in general clear, open and detailed. It never fatigues, not even at higher volumes. The player gives quite a bit of dynamics and vivacity, without making the sound image stressful or restless. The Marantz UD9004 takes it just a bit further when considering detail, airiness, maturity, musical connection and tranquility (dark black background). The final percentages… As far as the image is concerned, we can be very brief: sublime! The image of Blu-Rays is simply stunning. If you want to look at your DVDs again, you do not have to fear to do so. The UD8004 turns them into wonderful 1080p-images. But fair and square, once you go Blu-Ray, there is no way back… The UD9004 adds just that bit of black detail, color reproduction and depth.
Conclusion
In any healthy company development is done top-down. You start with a statement, a design where all possible technology is used to get to the ultimate performance. No compromises. At Marantz this starting point is the UD9004. Not everybody has €5.499 available to buy the absolute top model. What alternative do you have? You want reference level performance, but with a lower budget and in a less impressive casing. At Marantz you end up just one step below, with the smaller big brother UD8004. This player costs less than half of the UD9004. Main question is if this means that the UD8004 gets only half of the performance? The answer to this is clear: no. It’s a law that the improvements giving that 100% are most of the times not linearly connected to the price. An improvement of a few percent often costs a whole lot more. The UD9004 is built like a tank, has 32-bit DACS and houses the ultimate video processor, double HDMI outputs,… The UD9004 is there for the pure audio- and video lovers who accept only the very best, while the UD8004 is a fantastic compromise for the informed consumer that wants performance at reference level, in a more modest casing and with a much more democratic price tag. In short: the UD9004 is a reference player, the UD8004 a player with reference performance. For this reason the UD8004 deserves a Recommended Buy-label.
Test setupÂ
1 X Marantz AV 8003
2 X Marantz MM 8003
1 X Marantz UD 9004
4 X B&W 803S
1 X B&W HTM2D
2 X B&W ASW 825
1 X Marantz VP-11S2
1 X Beamax projection screen
