A year or so ago, a new “universal” DVD player — one that could handle both DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD multichannel music recordings as well as conventional DVDs and CDs — priced at anything less than a thousand bucks might have been big news. Today, a growing number of universal players are finding their way onto dealers’ shelves. And competition has brought us lower prices.

PDF: Format Compatibility

Case in point is Marantz’s DV6400, which plays just about everything and at a reasonable price. The DV6400 is slim, simple, good-looking, and space-efficient, too — it’s barely 8 inches deep and weighs less than 5 pounds. In fact, when I plugged my heavy-duty cables into its component-video output jacks, its rear panel actually bowed a bit as I twisted them home. No damage done, though.

In rendering the breathtaking images of The Two Towers, The DV6400 stood shoulder to shoulder with the best players.

The chassis may be lightweight, but I couldn’t fault the DV6400’s video performance. Finding I had two copies of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers on hand, I spent a good couple of hours doing A/B comparisons between the Marantz and my reference player — a widely praised unit costing about twice as much. I compared the two on a parade of still-frame and moving images from Middle-earth, with each player connected directly to my Princeton HDTV monitor’s component inputs using identical cables. I could see no visible differences: zero, zip, Zapata.

FAST FACTS

DIMENSIONS 17 1/4 x 3 x 8 1/4 inches PRICE $600 MANUFACTURER Marantz America, www.marantz.com, 630-741-0300

KEY FEATURES

• Plays nearly all digital optical disc formats • Full Dolby Digital and DTS decoding • Bass management for DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD • Composite-, component- (switchable interlaced/progressive-scan), and S-video outputs • Optical and coaxial digital audio outputs; 6-channel and stereo analog audio outputs

The Marantz effortlessly showed off the richness of this visually stunning production’s makeup, lighting, and set-dressing. In the icky scene between Aragorn and Arwen in Chapter 25, I could admire every peerless pore of Liv Tyler’s milky foundation — er, complexion. (So what’s the deal here: do the children get the pointy ears, or not?) And the resolution was so good that I could easily see the difference between the jaw-dropping New Zealand scenery and the model-shop look of scenes like the warg-riders battle or the digitized army of zombified baddies marching to the gates of Mordor in Chapter 15. Bottom line: the cost-conscious DV6400 can stand with the best players out there in terms of video performance.

Same deal on sound. The Marantz passed my DVD-Audio and SACD auditions without breaking a sweat. The exposed, quad-like surround of Beck’s Sea Change on SACD lets you appreciate subtle effects and timbres from individual instruments in ways you rarely can with stereo. Take, for example, the startlingly present rear-right cello in “It’s All in Your Mind.”

PLUS Excellent video quality. Bass management for all source formats. Quick, steady bidirectional searching. MINUS Poor remote control legibility. Lightweight chassis.

Similarly dramatic soundscapes await you on plenty of DVD-Audio discs, too, like the series of “you-are-there-on-stage” jazz mixes from Aix Records. The combination of string-bass and jazz drum-kit on Cheryl Bentyne Among Friends is remarkable, and the Marantz delivered its realism right down to the preternaturally present rattling of the snares and felt-not-heard woody vibes of the stage flooring under the double bass.

The Marantz offers bass management for DVD-Audio discs and SACDs as well as for Dolby Digital and DTS DVDs — a welcome change that we hope to see more of. However, SACD bass management is handled somewhat differently, with a high- and low-pass crossover point of 80 Hz instead of the 100 Hz used for all other formats.

On the ergonomics front, the remote control is not too cramped, and its slightly odd layout, with its off-center four-way cursor keys, was easier to learn to use by touch than I expected. And that’s a good thing because the gold-on-black labels were unreadable in my home theater when I dimmed the lights to watch a movie.

The Marantz player’s setup options and operating features include all the usual search modes, video zoom, and selectable black-level controls. There’s a nice bidirectional fast-search for DVD-Video, too: 2x, 8x, 50x, and 100x, which lets you get around in a pretty spry fashion, though the higher-speed reverse-scan modes were less smooth and predictable than the forward ones. This player was also quicker in skipping SACD and DVD-Audio tracks than some of the other universal players I’ve tested.

The Marantz DV6400 handily strikes a balance between stripped-down DVD-Video players made to sell at the lowest possible price and universal players that are built like safes and finished like jewelry — and priced accordingly. It defends this middle ground with considerable aplomb, and its audio and video qualities will leave no one feeling disappointed.

PDF: In The Lab