Every once in a while, I feel compelled for whatever reason to justify the existence of these unboxing blog posts, because it’s not about consumerism or SEO or anything else of the sort. Bottom line: it’s about telling a story slightly tangential to that of my in-depth gear evaluation—one that, I feel, gives you a more thorough overview of the product and the experience it delivers.
Reviews are about picking apart products on their own terms. During the unboxing process, though, I like to dig into the expectations set by the way a company decides to present the product. What story are they trying to tell here? What emotions do they want you to have the first time you touch a speaker or a DAC or—in the case of Magnetar’s UDP800 universal disc/media player (US$1599.99, CA$2500, £1399, €1620)—a source device?
Press releases and website copy tell you what a company wants you to think about its products, after all; the packaging and presentation often show you what they really think about their own gear and give some subtle (or not-so-subtle) hints as to whether or not they believe their own hype.
Mind you, the outer carton rarely makes much of a fuss about presentation. It’s there to do a job: namely, protecting the goodies inside. It’s interesting to see, though, that Magnetar is a little more straightforward in its categorization of the UDP800 (or UDP 800, depending on where you look), calling it a UHD Blu-ray player instead of the “universal disc/media player” language that dominates the web copy.
Peel back the lid on the outer case, and the inner carton sports the sort of logo laundry list you might expect, although it’s odd to me that HDMI is listed as a feature, with no hint about the exact spec supported. Anyway, I doubt most people scrutinize these logos, but it would look weird if they were missing, wouldn’t it?
The hero sheet atop the padding, once you open the inner carton, also features a similar logo laundry list, along with a nice photo of what’s to come and, again, a straightforward designation with no space. I can tell already that there’s going to be a 30-page internal SoundStage! email chain about whether this thing should be called the UDP 800 or UDP800. The magnetarusa.com website opts for the former; the magnetar-audio.com website consistently goes for the latter. You know what? It seems reasonable to assume these days that the American source is incorrect, so let’s go with UDP800. No space.
I have no idea whether I’m going to win that argument.
Flip that hero sheet out of the way, and suddenly it’s game on. First things first—I know y’all have got to be tired of hearing me say it, but playing right into the recurring theme of “it’d be weird if I didn’t say it”—the reliance on soft, squishy, super-shock-absorbent EPE foam instead of hard, crumbly, messy EPS is very much appreciated.
But look in the window between those EPE caps, and you’ll see something that’s just luxurious for luxury’s sake: black velvet cloth festooned with the Magnetar logo instead of perfectly functional but somewhat fragile foam paper. I’m sorry, but the simple fact of the matter is that if you’re trying to sell a 4K Blu-ray player for $1600 in the year 2025 and you’re not wrapping the damned thing in custom black velvet, you’re just doing it wrong.
Before you can unwrap the player from its velvety cocoon, though, you have to lift it and its foam padding out of the box. Underneath, you’ll find the ridiculously nice remote control (more on that in a bit), along with an instruction manual that gives more weight to my decision to refer to this thing as the UDP800, without the space.
Let’s get back to that remote control. I’m going to admit right up front that I’m in love with this thing, not only due to its soft-touch finish and excellent feeling in the hand (which, to be fair, doesn’t translate to photos), but also its exhaustive list of controls, including a backlight button—an absolute must for a remote this complex, but one that you sometimes don’t find.
And here we get our first look at the UDP800 coming out of its velvet bag. I’d seen photos of the player online, but I think the two-tone look works even better in person, as does the deft mix of gloss and brushed textures.
Don’t care about the looks of the player? That’s fair. I’m not here to tell you that you’re wrong. But given that you can buy UHD Blu-ray players with literally perfect A/V performance and unimpeachable scaling these days for under $500, a more luxury-oriented player like the Magnetar has to set itself apart in a number of ways, including aesthetics, and I think there’s real value in that. I might take some heat for saying so, but sometimes it’s simply nice to have nice things, even if you don’t need or care about the audiophile and videophile features packed into this chassis.
With the player fully out of the bag and turned right-side up, we get an even better look at its design, including the front-panel transport controls, which sport bold silkscreened icons that are hard to misinterpret, even in low-light settings.
Here we get a good 30,000-foot overview of the back panel, complete with one of the features that sets the UDP800 apart from much of its mass-market competition: gold-plated balanced XLR outputs fed by dual independent Burr-Brown PCM1795 DAC processors. There are also, of course, single-ended RCA outs, along with the standard array of digital audio and control connectivity.
That includes dual HDMI ports, as well as coaxial and optical digital outs. There’s also a USB 3.0 connection that supports external hard drives up to 16TB. Magnetar doesn’t give a list of the codecs and containers supported via USB, so for the time being I’m going to have to assume that’s simply a function of the MediaTek MT8581 SoC on which the UDP800 is built. That would mean it supports VP9 video but not AV1, but that’ll be one of the first things I test out when I start my proper evaluation.
Before cramming this thing into my gear rack, I couldn’t resist the urge to flip it over and get a good look at the feet, which are chunky and stable and resonance-rejecting. I’m not really sure that affects performance, but it’s yet another thing that makes the UDP800 feel like a player built for people who like nice things. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.
It’s one of a number of features that point toward a “no element taken for granted” attitude that Magnetar seems to have had when designing this chassis. Now, whether it all adds up to the UDP800 being worth its price tag is something I won’t be able to speak to until I’m done with my thorough review. So keep your peepers peeled for that, coming soon to the pages of SoundStage! Access.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
