Marantz DV6001

It was nearly five years ago that Denon and Marantz joined hands and started skipping tra-la-la down the street. Though they're now officially one company -- D&M Holdings -- the two brands are still separate. In fact, two of their DVD products compete blow by blow for your hard earned -- the recent Editor's Choice winner, the Denon DVD-1930, and Marantz's DV6001. Looking at the spec sheets and price tags they are almost impossible to tell apart, but as Vincent from Pulp Fiction once said: "It's the little differences".

Design
While Denon tends to favour chunky, rectangular components, Marantz positions itself as a prestige brand, and hence uses lots of brushed metal and gold or silver accents.

In comparison to the DVD-1930, the Marantz is quite squat, and this also means there is less room for the display. The LED display is quite small and very limited, and although the player supports CD text only seven characters will fit on it at a time. Functions such as HDMI on/off are represented by LED's instead of the icons you'd see on larger displays, and make little sense from across the room. The onscreen display, though, is excellent, and is one of the better ones we've seen for handling dual-format disks such SACD hybrids.

One small issue is that the disk tray isn't particularly good -- it's quite shallow, and it's easy to misalign the disk so that it doesn't read when closed. Remotes, however, have always been one of Marantz's strong points, and the pointing stick which comes with the DV6001 is also particularly good. Tweakers and beginners alike will find all the functions they need within easy grasp -- even amp volume can be controlled with it.

Features
Region free DVD plus DiVx? Yes. Upscaling to 1080p? Check. DVD-Audio and SACD playback? Affirmative. Aside from the obvious lack of Blu-ray or HD DVD compatibility -- this is a DVD player, after all -- there is very little amiss in terms of features here.

One thing that the Denon does have over the Marantz, however, is an audiophile-grade audio processor in the form of a Burr-Brown 24/192 Audio DAC, and this is part of what lends the Denon a more "musical" Performance. The Marantz meanwhile uses two different DAC's (digital-to-analog converters) in the form of a Cirrus Logic CS4360 and an AKM Semiconductor AK4382 -- both are rated at 24/192 but from our tests have a more clinical sound than the Burr Brown.

Video processing is one area where the players are on a par -- both share the excellent Faroudja DCDi chipset which removes video noise and can also upscale to 1080p via the HDMI connection.

In addition, the Marantz has all the connectivity you would expect. You get your usual component, composite, S-Video and optical/coax digital audio outputs here, in addition to HDMI.

The HDMI version is 1.1, which while not flash, means you can use the cable for DVD-Audio decoding. This is one of the reasons music lovers would choose this player over the cheaper DV4001 -- for its support of high-definition music -- while the videophiles would choose it for the upscaling capabilities.

Performance
Not unsurprisingly, given the shared heritage and similar hardware, the DV6001 performs on a par with the Denon when replaying DVDs. Edges are well defined, with a lack of jaggies, and images display good levels of contrast and saturation. Employing the upscaling works brilliantly, and on our 1080p Pioneer testbed, there is very little to complain about when DVDs are converted to HD. As with the Denon though, 1080p isn't always the best with contrasting images, and can be noisier than the 576p version -- and this is simply because the video scaler has to interpolate, or add, so many more pixels. On a whole, though, picture quality is excellent.

Sound is also well handled thanks to the combination of the two different DA (digital-to-analog) converters. Movie soundtracks are as intense or dialogue-focused as the soundtrack demands, and delivered with plenty of punch and clarity.

Stereo music is good, with clear highs and plenty of bass, though without as much clarity as the Denon player. DVD-Audio and SACD are also well-placed, if tending to sound a little too "digital" and trebly -- especially with DVD-Audio. The Marantz also offers 4x upscaling for CDs, and can be good if you favour vocals or classical, with a greater sense of detail and "air". However, bass-heavy music such as rock or dance can become quite trebly and lose punch with upsampling enabled -- fortunately both styles sound great with the default settings.

One minor point about the DV6001 is that it takes a long time to load disks -- almost to the same level of the Blu-ray and HD DVD players we've seen recently (such as the Toshiba HD-E1). On average, it took twice as long to play a DVD from standby as the Denon -- 34 seconds as opposed to 16 seconds. However, it wasn't as annoying in use as the Harman Kardon DVD 37 -- all playback functions were instantaneous -- and performance was otherwise excellent.