Let’s not bury the lede here, because I know the question right at the top of mind for most regular readers of SoundStage! Access: “Do I really need a $1600 4K Blu-ray player?” The answer to that question is, of course, no. As nice as the Magnetar UDP800 universal disc/media player (US$1599.99, CA$2500, £1399, €1620) may be, it doesn’t change that fact. So the real question is, why might you want this particular player, despite its cost, given that you can purchase a UHD Blu-ray player with literally perfect A/V performance for under $500?
Myriad reasons, actually, and it’s not for me to tell you how valid any of those reasons may be. You might, for example, just like nice things. As I discussed in my unboxing blog post, the UDP800 is world-class in terms of fit and finish, with one of the smoothest and steadiest disc trays I’ve encountered in ages, a wonderfully fancy remote control, and a breathtaking design that relies on an eye-catching and symmetrically asymmetrical mix of tones and different levels of specularity.
Say you don’t care about the look and feel of your gear, though. Say you’re purely focused on format support. Given that it’s based on the same MediaTek MT8581 platform that formed—in modified form—the heart of Oppo’s beloved UDP-203 and UDP-205, as well as the newer Reavon UBR-X200, the Magnetar UDP800 supports most disc-based audio and video formats you’re likely to care about, including DVD-Audio and SACD, along with UHD BD, BD, BD-R, BD-RE, DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-Video, AVCHD, CD, and CD-R/RW. It also decodes numerous file formats, including MKV, AVI, MP4, WAV, FLAC, APE, and DSF and DFF for DSD.
And, just to tick all the boxes, it supports Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HDR10+ high-dynamic-range video, not to mention the fact that the MediaTek platform is widely regarded as having HD-to-4K video upscaling capabilities not quite on par with, but close to those of Panasonic’s UHD Blu-ray players.
Put it all together and it means that, depending on your needs, you might be able to find a player that’s better in one aspect or another for a good bit less money. But, just speaking for myself, when I recently went searching for a backup for my old Oppo UDP-205, just in case it ever died completely to death, I struggled to find a player that would support my vast DVD-Audio collection and my meager multichannel SACD collection, and also not crap the bed with triple-layer UHD Blu-ray discs the way all of my friends’ Sony players do. Which left me thinking that the Reavon UBR-X200 was my next-best option. But the Reavon is notorious for struggling with DVD-Audio discs, as Roger Kanno reported in his excellent review. (Thanks for saving me that stack of coins, Rog!)
All of which is to say that when my Oppo finally does cross the rainbow bridge, I’ll be eyeing either the Magnetar UDP800 or, depending on the timing, its eventual replacement. But if you don’t have a vast DVD-Audio and/or SACD collection, you might be served just as well by a more affordable alternative.
Setting up and dialing in the UDP800
Heads up before you read too much further and get disappointed with me for glossing over some detail that might be incredibly important to you. As with its MediaTek MT8581-based siblings (and I’m including variants thereof), the Magnetar UDP800 is practically bursting at the seams with customization options that most people will never need, but there’s likely one in the bunch that will appeal to you and be the most important thing in the history of ever. And I can neither read your mind to guess what that might be, nor provide a comprehensive-enough rundown to leave no stone unturned, or this setup section would exceed reasonable word-count limits for an entire review.
You might, for example, be very invested in the subtitle resizing and repositioning settings, which are accessible via the quick press of a single button on the remote. That will be key if you have a 2.4:1 projection screen and don’t want your subtitles dipping down into the black bars that will be forced above and below the boundaries of your screen when your anamorphic lens slides into place. I’m using an aging but still perfectly acceptable Vizio P75-F1 TV, though, so subtitle shift is not a thing I’m overly concerned with. I merely mention it as one option that means a lot to a lot of people.
Likewise, given that this is a review unit and I don’t know who had their hands on it before me, I’m not sure what the default settings are and which ones might have been tailored to a different reviewer’s needs before it made its way to me. There are a few settings that, if they are indeed defaults, left me scratching my head as to why they were configured that way out of the box, though.
For example, the audio of the HDMI output was set to PCM instead of bitstream, which also meant that the audio output was variable in level, enabling the volume control buttons on the remote, but rendering the sound shockingly quiet until I switched the output to bitstream (although, to be fair, the Magnetar’s volume up button would have accomplished much the same).
DVD-Audio mode also defaulted to DVD-Video output, which meant that when I initially popped in my multichannel copy of Buena Vista Social Club, my best audio option was Dolby Digital 5.1.
Weird.
All of that means you’ll need to spend some time dialing in and tweaking the player’s various and sundry settings to match your needs, although—as we’ll dig into below—there are a few settings I would expect to find but simply can’t, which could be a function of my getting old, or it could be that they’re not there. I dunno.
In terms of physical setup, the UDP800 has all the outputs you’d expect for a player in its price range and then some, with perhaps one exception. It features dual HDMI outputs—one of them audio only, so you can run video directly to your display and audio to your preamp or AVR, in the event that it won’t pass through the latest video formats—along with optical and coaxial S/PDIF outs and two sets of stereo audio outputs, one balanced XLR and the other single-ended RCA. No multichannel analog outputs, if that’s a thing you need. For that, you’ll have to step up to the UDP900 (US$2999.99).
For my home-theater setup, I mostly relied on a single HDMI output to the Onkyo TX-RZ30 A/V receiver I’m currently long-term testing for Wirecutter, although I did run stereo analog outs for some quick comparisons.
Moving the player into my two-channel listening room quite a bit later, I relied mostly on stereo analog outputs to my NAD C 3050 integrated amp, although I also ran an optical connection so I could do some A/B comparisons between the Magnetar’s Burr-Brown PCM 1795 chips and the TI PCM5242 in my NAD.
One amusing aspect of the day-to-day operation of the UDP800 is that its remote also operates my Oppo UDP-205 just fine, so if you’ve got an old Oppo and the only thing wrong with it is the remote, go ahead and order a replacement from Magnetar. It’s a superior clicker in every way.
How does the UDP800 perform?
There are two discs I reach for immediately when evaluating any UHD Blu-ray player, if only because these two in particular have caused me problems when trying to view them on any non-PS5 Sony 4K player.
The first is The Wizard of Oz: 85th Anniversary Theater Edition Steelbook (Warner Bros.), which, in addition to being the best-looking version of the best film ever made, is also a quirky disc for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s that odd beast of a 4K disc that supports the HDR10+ format, an open, royalty-free dynamic HDR alternative to Dolby Vision. Secondly, for whatever reason, my UDP-205 won’t access either the Dolby Vision or HDR10+ version, defaulting instead to bog-standard HDR10—which still looks freaking spectacular.
I expected the same from the UDP800, since it’s based on a form of the same system-on-a-chip, but to my surprise, the Magnetar defaulted to the HDR10+ presentation, not the standard HDR10. And I couldn’t make it feed me the Dolby Vision version to save my life.
Not that it mattered. I couldn’t have asked for a better presentation than what I got from the HDR10+ version, and despite the fact that I fully intended to skip to a few key demo scenes and also let the disc play across the layer change that always seems to trip up Sony players, I ended up watching the entire film.
My life is hard, y’all.
Another disc whose layer changes seem to give Sony players a fit, in my experience, is Last Night in Soho (Universal Studios), which did play in Dolby Vision just fine on the UDP800. I honestly cannot remember where the layer changes in this one are, so I let the entire film play, and it never once hiccupped or froze. It also, needless to say, looked brilliant.
With that out of the way, I reached for my trusty Spears & Munsil HD Benchmark 2nd Edition Blu-ray disc and ran through the usual spate of evaluations. The chroma upsampling check screens showed a very slight amount of aliasing that was barely visible from my main seating position and very much on par with what I get from my Oppo UDP-205, although if I squinted sideways at the display, I was inclined to think that either the Magnetar’s high frequencies are a bit tweaked or the Oppo’s are a bit subdued, but we’re splitting hairs here. I doubt most people would notice the difference, and I wouldn’t swear in a court of law that I did.
Test patterns are one thing; for a real test of upscaling, though, one needs to evaluate real-world material with which one is intimately familiar. This will probably get me kicked out of the Videophile Treehouse (or, more accurately, make it clear once and for all that I’m a cinephile, not a videophile), but my go-to disc for gauging the quality of HD-to-UHD upscaling is The Samurai Trilogy on Blu-ray (Criterion Collection). The first scene of the first film on the first disc—Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto—frankly tells me everything I need to know about said upscaling capabilities.
It’s not a perfect-looking transfer, but such is impossible for this film. It is, on the other hand, as good as we could ever hope for, sourced as it is from 35mm low-contrast prints struck from the original camera negatives, as opposed to the negatives themselves. The consequence of this is that grain is a little boosted, not to mention quite uneven, but still wholly natural and unobtrusive, assuming you’ve got a good upscaler in place.
The UDP800 holds no surprises here. The upscaling looks identical to that of my old trusty Oppo, lending further evidence to the hypothesis that I might have been hallucinating the slightly boosted high frequencies I perceived when going cross-eyed looking at test patterns.
In the opening scene, Takezo (the future Miyamoto, played to perfection by the legend himself, Toshiro Mifune) and his friend Matahachi (Rentarō Mikuni) discuss the future while perched high up in a tree. Here, heavy-handed sharpening can lead to the rice fields in the background below looking artificial and grating, more drawn than photographed. The fine limbs and needles of the tree itself can also, if overly processed, ring egregiously.
On the other hand, without sufficient processing and upscaling, the textures can start to look a little soft on a 4K display viewed in cinematic proportions. Long story short, the Magnetar’s delivery of Samurai I: Musashi Miyamoto was superb, second only in my experience to the very best Panasonic UHD Blu-ray players, and a close second at that.
That brings up an interesting point of distinction between the Magnetar and a lot of its competition, though, as the UDP800 is billed as a universal disc and media player with audiophile street cred. I briefly tested the media-player aspect by connecting a gigantic USB hard drive on which I store a lot of media, most of it encoded in AV1, the open-source successor to VP9, due to its ability to go toe-to-toe with H.265 at even higher compression rates.
Not surprisingly, the UDP800 couldn’t decode AV1 (don’t be confused by the fact that it decodes AVI; that’s a different codec altogether). This is a nine-year-old system-on-a-chip we’re talking about here. I don’t think version 1.0 of the AV1 spec was finalized until two years after the release of the MediaTek MT8581 platform, and it wasn’t really viable until at least a year after that.
So the UDP800 couldn’t replace my Nvidia Shield Pro, which doesn’t officially support AV1 but decodes it just fine anyway. But then again, the UDP800 isn’t intended as a replacement for a good streamer. For all the files I could access via the player’s media-server menus, though, I found the browsing and playback experience to be perfectly fine, and I liked the organization of files onscreen.
A far, far better use of the player’s USB connection is that you can load .srt files onto a flash drive and play back external subtitles. It works like a charm, and aside from the Xbox Series X, I don’t know of other modern disc players that can do this without being jailbroken. If you’re curious why this matters, ask a Godzilla Minus One fan in your life and they’ll give you an earful.
To test CD playback, I added stereo RCA cables between the UDP800 and the Onkyo receiver in my media room and did some switching back and forth between digital and analog inputs. Any differences in sound quality were lost on me, which would be my hope, because the DAC implementation in the TX-RZ30 is unimpeachable, and any serious differences would mean that Magnetar was doing something silly with the reconstruction filters. (For what it’s worth, if the UDP800 does indeed have multiple filter options as its big sibling, the UDP900, does, I couldn’t figure out how to access them.)
One curious quirk of CD playback was that, when I had my display turned on (something I normally wouldn’t do when listening to music), I noticed that the UDP800 didn’t show cover artwork and was really inconsistent in its display of metadata. With Grateful Dead’s Crimson White & Indigo (Rhino GRA2-6015), all text metadata was missing in addition to the artwork, whereas when I popped the CDs into my Oppo, it pulled up metadata and images just fine.
Oddly, with 65daysofstatic’s No Man’s Sky: Music for an Infinite Universe Deluxe Edition (Laced Records 302 067 410 8), track titles displayed just fine, but still no cover art. Again, my Oppo not only rendered the album art, but also the artist and album title without issue. And both players were connected to the same network switch via the same model of Monoprice Cat6A patch cable.
Now, is that the sort of thing I’m terribly worried about? Given how frequently Magnetar updates the firmware on this thing, nope. Not even a little bit. During my time with the UDP800, it has received four substantial updates that I’m aware of. Most of them have been focused on much bigger issues than the display of CD metadata, but then again, most of those issues have been corner cases as far as I can tell, so I’m not sure where this issue falls on the company’s priority list. But it’s heartening to see how responsive the company is. That gives me hope for the future of this player, whereas I had a lot less hope for its direct predecessor in the ongoing attempt to become the successor to Oppo: the aforementioned Reavon UBR-X200.
What other 4K Blu-ray players should you consider in this class?
If I were looking to spend my own money on a fully featured UHD-and-then-some disc player right this very now, it would frankly come down to a choice between the Magnetar UDP800 and the Panasonic DP-UB820 ($589.99) upgraded with the Panasonic DP-UB9000’s remote control, model N2QAYA000172 (usually in the neighborhood of $15 on eBay).
That would unlock most of the customization capabilities I appreciate most in the Magnetar, and also give me better upscaling for SD and HD discs. But it would mean giving up SACD and DVD-Audio playback, as well as decoding of MKV files with lossless audio. And I think those would be deal-breakers for me. Plus, I don’t like the fact that external subtitles aren’t inherently supported, at least as far as I’m aware.
TL;DR: Is the Magnetar UDP800 worth the money?
Whether or not the UDP800 is worth its hefty price tag really comes down to the features and functionality you care about most. And I’m not saying that in a sort of weaselly “all products are valid” kind of way. If you could go out and buy another UHD Blu-ray player with SACD and DVD-Audio support that also included the customization features this one does, that also didn’t happen to crap the bed regularly the way non-PS5 Sony players do, then we could start to have more meaningful discussions about whether $1600 is a fair price to pay for this specific model.
For me, though, the Magnetar checks all the boxes I want checked, and unless someone else starts building a player based on the same MediaTek platform for a lot less money, it’s sort of alone in that respect.
But that brings up an interesting point. The MT8581 chipset is nearly ten years old at this point, and we just have no way of knowing if a successor (spiritual or literal) will be developed. The disc market is still shrinking, but UHD discs are a bigger share of that pie. Retail shops are shying away from discs, but that almost seems to be driving increased fervor for them. Disney has made it clear that streaming is dead or at least dying, but we all know the studios would rather sell you rights to access a stream or download, the license to which they can revoke at any time. So much so that they punish disc-buyers by arbitrarily making us wait weeks after the initial digital video release to buy the proper disc.
So the tea leaves are hard to read, and it’s impossible to know if the Magnetar UDP800 and its bigger sibling, the UDP900, are relics of the past or signposts to the future.
All I know is, I just want to be able to watch disc four of the Japanese release of Godzilla Minus One with bootleg English subtitles sourced from a thumb drive, and I want to be able to spin my multichannel DVD-A copy of Buena Vista Social Club and the SACD of Head Hunters without worrying about how I’ll listen to either if my Oppo fails me.
And right now, the Magnetar seems like my best backup solution. Plus, this thing is just fancy and luxurious in a way none of my Oppo players are. Sometimes it’s just nice to have nice things. But I’m not here to tell you my priorities should be your priorities. There’s just no denying that $1600 is a big old chunk of change to pay for a disc spinner.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
Associated Equipment
- Speakers: GoldenEar Triton One.R, GoldenEar SuperCenter Reference
- Subwoofers: SVS PB-4000
- A/V receiver: Onkyo TX-RZ30
- Display: Vizio P75-F1
- Speaker cables and analog interconnects: Straight Wire Encore II
- Digital interconnects: Monoprice 42674
- Power conditioner: SurgeX XC18
Magnetar UDP800 universal disc/media layer
Price: US$1599.99, CA$2500, £1399, €1620
Warranty: Two years parts and labor, transferable once
Magnetar Audio North America
41593 Winchester Road
Suite 200
Temecula, CA 92590
(888) 433-4843
Website: magnetarusa.com
