Marantz BD8002 Blu-Ray Disc Player

Marantz BD8002 Blu-Ray Disc Player Review

The BD8002 sets new standards as the source component in today's most advanced home entertainment systems. It plays DVDs, DVD-Rs, DVD-RWs, CDs, CD-Rs, CD-RWs, MP3 and WMA encoded files as well as today's Blu-ray high definition video discs. And a front-panel SD card reader eases the task of displaying your personal photographs on a large-screen display. Audio performance, Marantz's raison d'être, is nothing short of breathtaking. The BD8002 brings you every nuance, every percussive peak, every effect, every instrument thanks to critical circuit path routing and exceptional parts selection distilled from decades of experience. Built-in Dolby True HD and dts HD Master Audio 32-bit floating point processors let you output these reference-class audio formats via 7.1 channel analog connections or in digital form via an HDMI 1.3a link. Burr-Brown's PCM-1796 D/A converters provide 24-bit resolution as well as dynamic range capability in excess of 120 dB. Separate power supply connections for digital and analog portions of these advanced converters insures premium performance and reflects the attention Marantz engineers bring to audio performance. On the video side, a Silicon Optix Realta HQV video processor provides outstanding scaling to 1080p for exceptional big-screen detail from conventional DVDs. This processor provides 24 frame-per-second (fps) output for the finest movie reproduction you're likely to see anywhere. And the BD8002's HDMI 1.3a output supports the new and exciting 36-bit Deep Color standard for visual images that truly challenge the eye's ability to resolve delicate color shadings. For hard-core video aficionados, Marantz's selectable Pure Direct Digital Video circuit passes a DVD's unprocessed 480i digital video data to any advanced display device (a Marantz VP-11S2 projector, for example) to avoid the pitfalls of duplicate scaling and processing.