If you’ve got a spare £5,500 lying about then you can think about buying the Marantz’s UD9004 Blu-ray and SACD player. If you haven’t, well, join the club.

So what exactly can you expect from your £5,500? Well, the UD9004 is a fusion of the flagship SA-7S1 Super Audio CD player and the very best of the company’s Blu-ray technology.

In other words, this is an absolute beast of a Blu-ray / SACD player. It has a Silicon Optix Realta chip that offers the very finest broadcast quality video processing, including pixel-by-pixel conversion, 1080p upscaling by a 10bit process for standard definition images, detail enhancement, digital noise reduction and high-end analogue video output. You can even run the audio and video via separate HDMI connections just for that extra bit of quality.

For audiophiles there is 32-bit floating point type Analog Devices DSP for the purist audio imaginable with four separate circuit boards and a pure direct mode that shuts down the video playing elements to deliver exceptional, focused audio output.

The machine is built like a tank which will reduce mechanical distortion. The
extensively braced, chassis has a thick bottom plate with machine milled copper feet, sustaining mechanical stability and therefore sound quality. It weighs an incredible 19.2kg.

So, if you’ve read this post to its conclusion you’re obviously still interested. Go get yourself one from Marantz. If you’re feeling particularly flush – and let’s face it, you should be if you’re about to shell out over five grand for a Blu-ray player – order me one too.