Blu-Ray, Where Is My SACD Option?

D&M Holdings, the Japan-based consumer electronics corporation that owned several mid to high-end household brands including Marantz, Denon, Mcintosh, Snell, etc, has announced an additional Blu-Ray player by the end of March 2008. The company did not disclose what player will be released under which subsidiaries, but it's more likely the Marantz BD8002, which is also a rebadge of Denon DVD-3800 BDCI.

The Marantz BD8002 resembles Denon's 3800 BDCI, it has Profile 1.1 and Silicon Optix Realta Chipset with internal HD audio decoder up to 7.1 channels. But like many new Blu-Ray players revealed at CES 2008 last month, none of them really offered a complete package.

What happened to a good old Universal Player? Let's not counting HD-DVD, because we know it's going away and DVD-A is not likely with a Sony's Blu-ray transport. But can we at least get the SACD back ? Denon and Marantz are known in the past to provide SACD playback with their universal player, but not with their first entries to the Blu-ray market. Owners of high def audio with analogs option are facing with extra set of 5-7.1 analog inputs from a Blu-ray player. The HDMI crowd will have to deal with extra SACD player. I'm sure the limitation relies heavily on the transport, well, Work on it, Sony! There are some of us still buying your SACD disc, give us a complete package and I refuse to spend $2000 on a Blu-ray player without one.