The Marantz UD 9004 Blu-ray player replaces the Denon DVD-A1 UD as the most expensive player we’ve ever reviewed.

At 5,000 GBP through online retailers, it’s 500 GBP more expensive than the Denon — but it can’t knock the Denon off the top spot in terms of points. In the United States, Marantz lists the UD 9004 for 5,999.99 USD, and it’s available for about the same online.

Reviewed by Florian Friedrich on February 11, 2010

Outstanding Blu-ray picture quality.
Sensational sound (even via the analogue audio outputs).
Excellent build-quality.
High-quality DVD up-scaling.
Good drive mechanism.

High price.
Slow loading and navigation.

A player like the Marantz UD 9004 is a purchase for life, a timeless piece of high technology that seems to be built to last an eternity. Besides its excellent build quality, the UD 9004 shines with outstanding Blu-ray and DVD picture quality and high-end sound. The only irritating things about it are the long loading and navigation times.

Market Position

Blu-ray players are no longer a luxury product — in the times of globalisation, ever cheaper players are forcing their way into the market. And although most 200-GBP players offer excellent picture and sound quality, there are still people that find the plastic components and wobbly drive trays irritating — especially if they’ve got a valuable collection of Blu-rays, DVDs, CDs, and SA-CDs.

Into this niche slots Marantz’s new super player, the UD 9004, which is aimed at well-heeled music and home-cinema fans.  Marantz is part of D&M Holdings, and cooperates with Denon on HDMI video technology, but the UD 9004 is very much its own beast, with a specially developed drive and proprietary Marantz audio technology — such as the discrete HDAM output circuits for amplifying analogue signals.

Multimedia

It’s not surprising that the player is fairly conservative in this respect — after all, it’s intended for video and audio purists. The LAN socket, for example, only allows firmware updates and BD-Live downloads — and you’ll need to provide an SD card in order to save BD-Live content. The card reader also allows playback of photos, MP3 music files, and DivX videos.

All 10 video controls are active during photo playback, and you can save the gamma, chroma level, and sharpness settings to five memory locations. Photos display attractive scaling and natural colours, and the sharpness control teases a great deal of detail out of softer-looking images.

The loading times fail to impress, however, for high-definition images. AVCHD files only play back on the Marantz if you first burn them to a disc.

Other Features

Two separate audio boards are responsible for the stereo cinch output and the symmetric XLR output; two further separate boards handle multichannel output. The two HDMI outputs can feed an AV receiver and display separately.

The disc drive, which sits in the centre of the device, is doubly encased in aluminium in order to shield it from other circuits and to reduce drive noise. The additional “Marantz Precision Mechanism” is designed to reduce vibrations in the disc’s rotation. The drive operates with high precision, as you can hear and feel when the drive tray slides out — the motors responsible for the tray’s elegant motion are barely audible. Overall, this gives a luxurious impression of quality.

The same applies, of course, to the rest of the device’s internal components, but Marantz’s approach to universal players differs from Denon’s. Whereas the Denon DVD-A1 UD puts the emphasis on digital-audio transmission via Denon Link, Marantz’s engineers put their best components into the decoding, processing, and D–A conversion. So the player can transmit SA-CD sound via HDMI, but not uncompressed, as is the case with Denon Link; instead, the Marantz only outputs it at 16-bit resolution and a 44.1-kilohertz sampling rate. The Japanese player delivers its best SA-CD audio quality through its analogue outputs, which use superb “AK 7344” D–A converters.

There are also symmetric XLR outputs for stereo playback in order to deliver analogue signals to receivers and amplifiers over longer stretches of cable, without losing information or introducing interference. Unlike digital connections, analogue connections are not susceptible to cable-related jitter.

Jitter also affects HD audio from Blu-rays. The UD 9004 outputs HD audio in digital form as an HDMI bitstream or as internally decoded PCM. In most cases, the bitstream is significantly more resistant to jitter than PCM transmitted via HDMI; on the Marantz, however, the analogue multichannel audio is the best alternative. With short cables and appropriate player setup, this represents the best basis for combating jitter. For analogue 7.1-channel sound, the player provides a complete speaker-management system (see box below).

But that’s not all: The UD 9004 also offers various “Pure Direct” modes and separate connections for the AV receiver and display device. With “Pure Direct” active, you can switch off the front-panel display and the video output, although switching off the latter also stops the audio output via HDMI. In terms of video, you can set the two HDMI outputs to different colour spaces, but both have to run at the same resolution.

Operation

The black aluminium finish gives the remote a classy feel, but the buttons don’t light up.

In this discipline, the Marantz loses points for being one of the slowest players of all time, especially with discs that have a BD-Java menu. When we inserted the Blu-ray “Iron Man”, it took almost two and a half minutes until the video began playing; “Men in Black” needed about one and a half. We hope that future firmware releases will manage to speed up this process.

The quick-start function can at least sometimes reduce your waiting time: If a DVD or Blu-ray disc without BD-Java programming is already in the player when it’s switched off, the player needs just a few seconds to pick up playback from where it left off. The catch: The quick-start function increases standby power consumption to almost 20 watts. But the Japanese player isn’t particularly eco-friendly in the first place: The operating power consumption of a massive 58 watts is exceeded only by Sony’s gas-guzzling PlayStation 3.

On the other hand, we loved the direct access to the player’s functions: For example, you can change the output resolution during playback via the remote control, and the “Display” button brings up information such as the audio format, HDMI resolution, 24p playback, and colour space. Similarly practical is the option to call up various picture functions directly from the remote control.

DVD Picture Quality

The Marantz displays DVD films in outstanding quality. It recognises all video modes automatically and offers perfect up-scaling, which you can adjust to meet the properties of each disc using the numerous video controls.  One special feature: The video processor also delivers 24p playback from NTSC DVDs. All you need to do is switch the output resolution from “Auto” to “1080P24”. On the test disc “DTS Demonstration DVD No. 3”, this makes the rocket in a clip from “Apollo 13” glide across the sky much more smoothly. In classic 60-hertz playback, we would have seen 3:2 pulldown judder.

Blu-ray Picture Quality

The HDMI frequency response is totally linear if you set the sharpness control to -1.

You don’t necessarily have to spend thousands to get a truly superb Blu-ray picture — many cheaper players offer excellent picture quality. But most of them also exhibit slight deviations that could bother perfectionists. Either the colour decoding is a bit imprecise or the player fails to perfectly reproduce the standard levels for black and white. Cheap players can also have problems displaying blacker-than-black and whiter-than-white picture regions. But not the Marantz: Here, literally everything displays correctly. The video frequency response is absolutely linear, right up to the highest frequencies — so long as you set the sharpness control to -1 for the higher frequency range.

The HQV de-interlacer produces some particularly professional results with 1080i material at 60 hertz. In the “Auto” film mode, the Japanese player outputs all test sequences with maximum vertical sharpness and no edge-flicker whatsoever. If you switch to the “Video 1” mode, the de-interlacer even converts 1080/30p films into flicker-free 1080/60p via 2:2 pulldown.

The numerous picture controls can also come to the aid of some projectors, such as the JVC DLA-HD 950, whose gamma and sharpness settings are deactivated in its best picture mode. The UD 9004 means you can now iron out this kink in the JVC’s operation — very practical! But we noticed an error in the player’s gamma settings: The new gamma values are only applied if you change the uppermost value in the 10-band gamma correction — this is the same error as we’ve seen in Denon’s universal players. Nevertheless, the player’s performance — like that of the Denon A1 UD — is enough to secure full marks for Blu-ray quality.

Metal, metal, and more metal: The doubly screened casing is packed full of separate power-supply and audio circuits.

A Duel: Analogue Sound vs. HDMI Sound

For our listening test, we hooked the player up to a Marantz SR 6004 AV receiver in a 7.1-channel configuration. High-end receivers with symmetric XLR inputs might be better for evaluating stereo sound, but we wanted to check the analogue 7.1-channel interface for both stereo and multichannel audio.

First test disc: the SA-CD “30th Anniversary” by Ken Ishiwata, with which we’re comparing the sound via the analogue 7.1-channel output and HDMI. We choose the song “How Insensitive”, which consists of piano and vocals. After the first piano notes, we hear a very fine noise, presumably from a microphone track being turned up — in other words, we can hear even the tiniest details. After getting rid of the initial level difference between the HDMI and analogue 7.1 outputs, we find that the cymbals sound fuller via the analogue connection.  The next song, “Body & Soul”, contains sharp stabs of piano with tonnes of treble — here, again, the analogue transmission sounds dynamic, clear, authentic, and attractive. Via HDMI, the sound lacks some elegance and power, but you have to listen really closely to notice this.

The 180-series Elac speakers we used in this test deliver too little bass in George Gershwin’s “Summertime” — and the explanation is simple: With speakers defined as “Large”, the player diverts none of the bass to the subwoofer, since SA-CD recordings have no low-frequency effects (LFE) channel. Still, the user can change this behaviour (if the player is connected via HDMI) by changing the receiver’s subwoofer mode to “Both” — this sends additional bass information to the sub. When connected via the analogue 7.1 output, this only works for “Small” speakers. For normal CD playback via the analogue output, the subwoofer remains silent; via HDMI, on the other hand, you can force playback to use the subwoofer. The advantage is immediately obvious: In Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition”, the Elac subwoofer gives the timpani more weight and conveys more of the concert-hall atmosphere. This example won’t necessarily apply to all other speaker sets, but it shows that differences in the setup are sometimes more audible than the nuances of the interfaces.

With the Blu-ray bitstream, the subwoofer problem doesn’t matter — here, there’s always an LFE channel, allowing Elacs subwoofer to demonstrate its capabilities with both transmission types.

Sound Quality in Films

The constantly changing soundtracks of films make it impossible to pick out tiny changes in sound. The Marantz sounds phenomenal via both analogue and digital transmission. For example: In the first chapter of “Iron Man”, AC/DC’s “Back in Black” accompanies a scene showing a military convoy. Even as background music, the hard-rock track dominates your hearing, and you can’t help but tap your feet. You can even feel the greater dynamics of the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 in your body as the convoy is attacked and the first bomb goes off. Shots fly at the listener from all sides and sound frighteningly realistic. The power amp, speakers, and subwoofer prove once again what a huge reserve of dynamics the uncompressed HD audio on Blu-rays offers.

If you want to share your opinion on this projector,
please reply to the thread accompanying this review on avsforum.com.