This is a quick review and detailed measurements of the audio performance of the Panasonic DP-UB820-K. It was purchased in May of this year and kindly sent to me by a member for testing. It costs US $500 so definitely premium priced relative to dirt cheap players you could buy. The hope is that its analog output provides decent performance above what you may get in your AVR being fed over HDMI.
The player is quite light but the plastic front gives it a bit of class:
As you see there are multichannel analog output which is the focus of our interest:
Initially I could not get any audio out of the analog outputs. After some head scratching, I decided to look in the menus and found that it was disabled. I don't know why they would do this other than maybe to lower power consumption a tiny bit or pass regulatory certification better.
To feed it data I used a USB thumb drive with my measurement files on it. Oddly the player pretended to play all of them, two of them would not play (dynamic range and multitone). One was at 192 khz sampling so maybe that was the issue but the other was a mono 44.1 kHz file so it should have handled that without issue.
UHD Player Audio Measurements
I played my 24-bit, 44.1 kHz 1 kHz tone used in my dashboard and this was the result:
Nice to see 2 volt output but sad that 2nd harmonic distortion is up in -95 dB range. Add a bit of noise to it and you get the SINAD of 92 dB as compuated:
In other words, you don't have transparency to 16 bit content let alone higher bit depth. This is typical performance of an 8-channel DAC that sells for 50 cents (I am guessing here).
The only other file I could play was jitter:
Best in class DACs have the noise floor underneath the AudioScienceReview logo. We are about 20 dB higher. And have tons of interference tones that seem to go well beyond the typical power supply spikes.
Conclusions
Panasonic states this in feature list of the player:
Well, no "basking" was to be had here. The DAC implementation can't even clear 16 bit content let alone high-res audio at higher bit depths.
The statement about HDMI is also incorrect/misleading in that audio is slaved to video in HDMI. So even "audio only" HDMI output has video in it, usually in the form of a black video signal.
Overall, the audio performance of Panasonic DP-UB820 is very disappointing even for a mid-class player. Let's hope a company like Panasonic steps up to the plate and produce SINAD of at least 100 dB in such a class.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Panasonic DP-UB820 for analog audio output. Use your AVR's DAC over HDMI as it is likely to perform better.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Depressing day today.... Have a ton of fruit to preserve but we are so tired of peeling, coring and canning fruit that we don't even want to look at another pear or apple. You can donate money in the hopes of cheering me up but it may not work: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The player is quite light but the plastic front gives it a bit of class:
As you see there are multichannel analog output which is the focus of our interest:
Initially I could not get any audio out of the analog outputs. After some head scratching, I decided to look in the menus and found that it was disabled. I don't know why they would do this other than maybe to lower power consumption a tiny bit or pass regulatory certification better.
To feed it data I used a USB thumb drive with my measurement files on it. Oddly the player pretended to play all of them, two of them would not play (dynamic range and multitone). One was at 192 khz sampling so maybe that was the issue but the other was a mono 44.1 kHz file so it should have handled that without issue.
UHD Player Audio Measurements
I played my 24-bit, 44.1 kHz 1 kHz tone used in my dashboard and this was the result:
Nice to see 2 volt output but sad that 2nd harmonic distortion is up in -95 dB range. Add a bit of noise to it and you get the SINAD of 92 dB as compuated:
In other words, you don't have transparency to 16 bit content let alone higher bit depth. This is typical performance of an 8-channel DAC that sells for 50 cents (I am guessing here).
The only other file I could play was jitter:
Best in class DACs have the noise floor underneath the AudioScienceReview logo. We are about 20 dB higher. And have tons of interference tones that seem to go well beyond the typical power supply spikes.
Conclusions
Panasonic states this in feature list of the player:
Well, no "basking" was to be had here. The DAC implementation can't even clear 16 bit content let alone high-res audio at higher bit depths.
The statement about HDMI is also incorrect/misleading in that audio is slaved to video in HDMI. So even "audio only" HDMI output has video in it, usually in the form of a black video signal.
Overall, the audio performance of Panasonic DP-UB820 is very disappointing even for a mid-class player. Let's hope a company like Panasonic steps up to the plate and produce SINAD of at least 100 dB in such a class.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Panasonic DP-UB820 for analog audio output. Use your AVR's DAC over HDMI as it is likely to perform better.
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Depressing day today.... Have a ton of fruit to preserve but we are so tired of peeling, coring and canning fruit that we don't even want to look at another pear or apple. You can donate money in the hopes of cheering me up but it may not work: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/