The £12,000 DVD Player

For those of you with money to burn we have a wee Christmas tip for you - Meridian Audio, based in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, manufactures what it believes is the world's most expensive DVD playback machine.


Meridian Audio's 800 V4 Disc Player

The company's Model 800 player starts at about £12,000. The price ratio between it and the ubiquitous £30 machines is greater than that between a Lamborghini and a Toyota Corolla.

The company's co-founder, Robert Stuart, said that to ask why anyone would spend that much for a player was not the right question. "In a sense, you should ask, 'What do you get for so little?"' he said.

The Model 800 represents what some believe to be the pinnacle in audio and video processing technologies: It plays video recorded in the American NTSC and European PAL systems, and uses proprietary software to decode the audio, complex processing to increase picture resolution and extra buffer memory to ensure that the disc is read properly.

"Typically, people plug in our player and say 'Wow!"' Stuart said.

But according to many of Stuart's mass-market DVD competitors, you can often get a lot for quite a bit less.

When the DVD format arrived in 1996, players cost £800. Today, models from the best-known brands often cost no more than £40, and second-tier brands are even less.

DVD recorders are readily available for around £120, though their popularity as a replacement for VHS recorders has been challenged by TiVo-like digital video recorders.

But companies like Denon and Meridian have developed a business selling players that are considerably higher in price.

If you watch DVDs on a small, standard analog set, industry executives say, there is little reason to buy anything more than a low-priced DVD player. On a little tube TV, it is likely that a DVD's picture and sound quality will be as good coming from a £30 machine as from a £3,000 one.

Digital high-definition TVs, on the other hand, and larger analog TVs with component video inputs have raised the performance bar. To get the best picture and sound from these luxury models, you will need a DVD player with higher specifications.

While standard specifications govern how all DVD signals are compressed and recorded, "how you get video out of the player differs," according to Jeff Talmadge, marketing manager for Denon Electronics USA.

Video signals need to be decompressed and are often converted to analog signals before being sent to a TV display. Inferior chip sets can create more picture noise, making pictures look fuzzy, with a lower-contrast, muddy look.

"With inferior video processing, you can see speckles in a blue sky that are not there, or a loss in shadow detail that decreases a perception of depth," said Phil Abram, the home audio and video vice president for marketing at Sony Electronics.

Processing chips by companies like Faroudja and Silicon Optix are promoted as offering superior video processing compared with generic technologies. One of these chips is used in all Denon models, except the lowest-priced (£80). A Faroudja video processor is also available in two Panasonic models, the DVD-S77S (£160) and DVD-S97S (£180).

Also, the more chips used for individual processing tasks, the better the picture. Less expensive models may combine all processing in one chip, increasing picture noise. At the other extreme, the 800 model from Meridian uses 25 chips for video processing.

True high-definition DVD players are scheduled to hit the market next year, but their future is marred by a format war between two incompatible technologies: HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Both formats will be pricey at first, with players around £700.

More-expensive DVD players offer what is called HD up-conversion: The circuitry tries to increase an image's resolution by interpolating the existing picture, adding additional lines of information so it resembles a true HDTV picture. The system is available only with players that have HDMI outputs, and its effects can be seen only on HDTV displays. How well the player approximates high definition depends on the quality of the circuitry.

Talmadge said that the Silicon Optix chip used in Denon's £2,000 DVD5910 model produced a picture "that is almost the same as HD."

The first DVD players could handle discs only in the CD, DVD and VCD formats. Now even the lowest-priced models, like the £50 DVP-NS50P from Sony, can play many other formats, like recorded CDs, DVDs and even CDs or DVDs containing MP3 files.

DVD-Audio and SA-CD are two higher-quality surround-sound formats used for audio recordings. The DVD1920 model from Denon (£200) can handle both. A Sony model, the £120 DVP-NS90V, is compatible with SA-CD discs, and the £80 Panasonic DVD-F87K/S can play DVD-Audio.

Story source: iht.com.

Meridian website: meridian-audio.com.