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Panasonic 2018 flagship UB9000 Blu-ray player launching at Value Electronics

Timbo2

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I see yet another Chinese made, light pressed steel-cased, failure prone SMPS supply with a internal fan to pull dust in through the edges of the disc tray

After two decades of building PCs I've become a bit of an expert on power supplies and fans. Fans have been my #1 failure point - even expensive ones. Unfortunately in the PC world for current PCs of a certain performance level a fully passive design is difficult or impossible. I have one passive machine that works as an HTPC, but I was unhappy with my hard drive temperature and relented to a single large low speed fan.

But I don't understand most fan usage in lots of home AV gear, amplifiers excluded. Usually it is done for aesthetic and cost reasons. For example I have an Nvidia Shield TV that has a passive power brick, but a small fan on the CPU. I'm assuming that reason is because they slapped the thing in the smallest and trendiest plastic case they could. I love the device, but hate the fan.

In this specific case it appears the CPU/Processor is passively heat sinked on the far right and the fan is only needed on the power supply. Other than cost I'm at a loss why they couldn't design a passive power supply / case design that was able to provide power to this player.

I agree, it is disappointing.
 

The Dragon

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Amir is correct, if the UB9000 was SACD capable royalties would be required and again as Amir said, politics are also in play.

Since OPPO exited the BD business, their are no competitive BD players that support SACD. I understand and agree that SACD support would have been an important feature and I have stressed this in my reports and I will continue to do so. Supporting all formats of Hi Res audio is a good thing. Further, with the UB820 and UB9000 support for all HDR formats, e.g. HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision HDR is important and make this player the only universal HDR player available.

Sony makes an ES model that not only supports all HiRes audio formats, but also supports SACD and DVD-Audio. It doesn't have balanced audio outputs, but otherwise looks like a competitive model with legacy formats supported. (for less money MSRP $699)

https://www.sony.com/electronics/blu-ray-disc-players/ubp-x1000es
 

Dialectic

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Oops, yes my engineering sample does say "made in China" I was originally told the UB9000 would be built in Japan.

I edited my post to remove the country of origin until we confirm where the UB9000 MP will be built.

@Robert Zohn, I'm sorry we're all beating up on the UB9000, and thank you for your candid and courteous responses.
 
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Robert Zohn

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Two power supplies and the CPU called for the low velocity fan to dissipate the heat.

I love Sony's flagship UBP-X1000ES BD player.

However, one of the important features these new BD players do that no other BD player has ever done is to unquestionably delivery the best HDR image quality. And the difference is not small. The HDR Optimizer can be set to match your TVs peak luminance ability so you see all of the tonal range that is mastered on the disc.

For the $1k price Panasonic built a very high-end premium BD player.
 

Sal1950

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Sad that support for HDCD discs has all but completely disappeared. ?
 

Kal Rubinson

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Unfortunately in the PC world for current PCs of a certain performance level a fully passive design is difficult or impossible. I have one passive machine that works as an HTPC, but I was unhappy with my hard drive temperature and relented to a single large low speed fan.
I am not presenting myself as an expert in PC design or construction but I have had 2 "silent" PCs (only a large low speed fan) with rather robust CPUs (i7s of 7th and 8th generation) and have a fully passive one on the way. I have not had any issues. As for the HD temp, that is irrelevant since I have none in that chassis and rely on NAS storage.
 

Timbo2

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I am not presenting myself as an expert in PC design or construction but I have had 2 "silent" PCs (only a large low speed fan) with rather robust CPUs (i7s of 7th and 8th generation) and have a fully passive one on the way. I have not had any issues. As for the HD temp, that is irrelevant since I have none in that chassis and rely on NAS storage.

Not to derail this thread, with the latest generation of Intel desktop and mobile processors a high performance build is much more possible. My passive build is a 4th generation Intel. And solid state storage is coming down in price all the time. Depending on how you much you write to SSD will determine if you can live with it throttling write performance due to heat and a passive setup.

If you need an external GPU and 4K or UHD you don't have good passive options last time I checked. Not sure how Intel's latest internal GPUs do here. I only run 1080p. Historically and in my experience Intel's video isn't as robust as Nvidia or in the old days ATI/AMD.
 

svart-hvitt

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ON FANS

Some Macs and all ipads don’t have fans.

So passive power in small places is a possibility in some designs. Maybe the disc player is more computing powerful than those designs? Do we have some computing figures for the Panasonic?
 

The Dragon

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Two power supplies and the CPU called for the low velocity fan to dissipate the heat.

I love Sony's flagship UBP-X1000ES BD player.

However, one of the important features these new BD players do that no other BD player has ever done is to unquestionably delivery the best HDR image quality. And the difference is not small. The HDR Optimizer can be set to match your TVs peak luminance ability so you see all of the tonal range that is mastered on the disc.

For the $1k price Panasonic built a very high-end premium BD player.

So this is intended to be more of a high end video product than a "universal" player. That's a different market niche than what I had assumed. I must have missed that in all this. My apologies if I derailed this discussion. Somehow I got the impression that it was aimed at the universal player market.
 

Fitzcaraldo215

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After two decades of building PCs I've become a bit of an expert on power supplies and fans. Fans have been my #1 failure point - even expensive ones. Unfortunately in the PC world for current PCs of a certain performance level a fully passive design is difficult or impossible. I have one passive machine that works as an HTPC, but I was unhappy with my hard drive temperature and relented to a single large low speed fan.

I have only one fan-equipped component in my music room with 7.1 audio, a vestigial Power Conditioner, which does nothing to the sound, but adds convenient on/off switching. It serves merely as an expensive power strip, bought in a weak moment years ago. I never heard the fan. If I did or if it altered the sound, I would get rid of it. I have had other audio/video gear in the past with fans, but they never were noticeable or bothered me.

PCs are a different matter. I do have an HTPC in the next room, together with NAS and networking gear. So, I hear none of those noisy items, either. The PC is connected through the wall to my DAC and TV via 5 meter USB and HDMI cables. It works great as the single source for all my audio and video controlled by a wireless keyboard/touchpad or from my iPad.

The PC is a common tower with noisy fans and drives. There is no player in the room, except for an Oppo 103, occasionally used only for SACD ripping. I mount other BD, DVD and CD discs to optical drives in the PC just steps away.

The only thing I lack is a shrine up front to worship all my gear and impress my friends. But, I am very happy to have eliminated an HT processor and its high obsolescence factor in favor of a single source HTPC for all media.
 
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Robert Zohn

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So this is intended to be more of a high end video product than a "universal" player. That's a different market niche than what I had assumed. I must have missed that in all this. My apologies if I derailed this discussion. Somehow I got the impression that it was aimed at the universal player market.
Panasonic's UB820 and UB9000 are designed and aimed towards the BD market. It is the first and only "Universal BD player" as it supports all HDR protocols. The UB9000 is the flagship unit and has excellent audio performance, but will not support SACD discs. Other than no support for SACD audio enthusiasts will enjoy and appreciate the audio performance.

I can tell you for BDs using the HDMI audio and especially for 2-channel when connected via the balanced XLR ports to the the audio fidelity and overall quality is excellent and beyond what I have heard from any BD player. I connected the UB9000 with the XLR outputs to a high-end power amp bypassing the pre-pro processor as I used the UB9000's built-in "Analog Audio" volume control.

Here's a couple screen shots of some of the audio menus.

Panasonic UB9000 Analog Audio Filters Menu.jpg


Panasonic UB9000 Analog audio menu.jpg


Panasonic UB9000 HDMI output configuration menu.jpg
 

amirm

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However, one of the important features these new BD players do that no other BD player has ever done is to unquestionably delivery the best HDR image quality.
Adapting the HDR content to that of the display was always a massive hole in my mind in the architecture of these systems. Seemed to me the features this new player has to be mandatory to get proper pictures. So while our membership here is audio focused, I am with you on huge importance of this with respect to video.

And since this is a home theater subforum, I ask the membership to not ignore discussion of video.
 

svart-hvitt

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Panasonic's UB820 and UB9000 are designed and aimed towards the BD market. It is the first and only "Universal BD player" as it supports all HDR protocols. The UB9000 is the flagship unit and has excellent audio performance, but will not support SACD discs. Other than no support for SACD audio enthusiasts will enjoy and appreciate the audio performance.

I can tell you for BDs using the HDMI audio and especially for 2-channel when connected via the balanced XLR ports to the the audio fidelity and overall quality is excellent and beyond what I have heard from any BD player. I connected the UB9000 with the XLR outputs to a high-end power amp bypassing the pre-pro processor as I used the UB9000's built-in "Analog Audio" volume control.

Here's a couple screen shots of some of the audio menus.

View attachment 13907

View attachment 13908

View attachment 13909

Will the Panasonic perform as a «cleaner» of other HDMI sources like TV boxes (say Apple TV or cable TV box), to reduce jitter, improve video signals in any way?

Some audio boxes are said to reclock and clean up the audio signal. Will the Panasonic box have this function for both audio and video?

In other words: Does it have HDMI in?
 
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jhaider

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Since OPPO exited the BD business, their are no competitive BD players that support SACD.

Define "competitive" using something other than price point, which only matters to the end user if it buys additional relevant (here, audio) capability. The way I see it, because this player lacks basic decoding capabilities that have been available in disk spinners for this entire millennium (DVD-A, SACD) from the perspective of an audio forum it is not even competitive with the $250 Sony X800.

Sony has a more expensive player, discussed above. For normal use - player connected to AVR or SSP over HDMI - there is no apparent advantage to the expensive one. At least for now. I expect Sony realizes that and going forward will reserve universality for their most expensive player. That is analogous to how Anthem's first AVR lineup all had the same processing capabilities but increasing amplifier power at higher price points. Smart people all bought the cheap one! In their second go around and beyond, Anthem lowered the channel count on the cheaper ones (without lowering the price compared to the previous entry level) to entice buyers to spend more.

All the HDR formats are nice, I guess, but where's the content? Most new watchable content today is TV rather than cinema anyway. TV is largely streamed, not spun. So practically the HDR formats that Apple and Roku support are going to be the ones that get content, and the others will be HD-DVD or DIVX etc. The decreasing reliance on disk spinners for video content, combined with the difficulty of serving one's SACD and DVD-A collection, makes the audio format decoding capabilities of a disk spinner even more important.
 
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Robert Zohn

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@amirm, no on/of or speed control of the fan.

@svart-hvitt, no HDMI input, but I like that idea and will pass it along in my next engineering report.

@][/B]jhaider, your ignoring the HDR Optimizer that is the most important and very valuable feature/benefit, which no other BD player offers.
 
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jhaider

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@[B]jhaider[/B], your ignoring the HDR Optimizer that is the most important and very valuable feature/benefit, which no other BD player offers.

It doesn't play multichannel music disks. That is the end of the story for me as to the player's utility.
 
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Robert Zohn

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Give me a multichannel music disc title and I'll buy and try it in the UB820 and UB9000.
 
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