Magnetar UDP900MKII and UDP800MKII Earn THX Certification — a Badge on Unchanged Hardware

Magnetar's two flagship universal disc players, the UDP900MKII and UDP800MKII, have completed THX Certification following testing at THX's laboratories, the two companies announced on 3 November 2026. The practical thing for an owner or prospective buyer to understand first: this is a badge applied to existing hardware. As eCoustics states plainly, the certification adds no new features and does not change the performance of either machine.

Both players remain on sale at their existing US prices — $3,399.99 for the UDP900MKII and $1,899.99 for the UDP800MKII, according to audioXpress, which lists them as suggested retail figures available now direct from Magnetar and through authorised dealers and distributors.

What THX says it tested

eCoustics describes a programme of more than 200 laboratory tests spanning four broad areas. The first is image precision: colour reproduction, contrast, black and white levels, luminance, gamma, and the presence of artefacts or softening. The second is upscaling behaviour, covering Blu-ray, DVD and lower-resolution digital content. The third is audio output, with both multichannel and stereo paths assessed for accuracy and distortion. The fourth concerns signal delivery — whether the players decode correctly and hand audio and video on to downstream components intact.

That is a reasonable map of what a universal player actually has to get right. What is missing is the arithmetic. No measured results from THX's testing have been published, as audioXpress notes, so there is no public figure to compare against another certified player or against an independent measurement. Nor, eCoustics points out, has either company stated which version of the THX programme applies or which HDR formats were covered by the testing.

Rob Jones, President of Magnetar North America, called THX Certification "a critical independent validation". Steven P. Martz, Vice President of Global Technology Partnerships at THX Ltd., said the models earned certification "after our extensive testing and evaluation in the THX labs".

The hardware underneath

Nothing in the players has changed, but the certification is a reasonable moment to restate what is in them. The UDP900MKII, per audioXpress, carries two ESS ES9038PRO DAC chips — one handling stereo, one multichannel — with balanced XLR and single-ended RCA stereo outputs plus a 7.1-channel RCA set. OPA1602 op-amps handle the output stage, and a 60W toroidal transformer feeds the analogue section. A USB input accepts PCM up to 768kHz and DSD512.

The UDP800MKII uses two Burr-Brown PCM1795 DACs, offers XLR and RCA stereo outputs, and runs seven OPA1602 op-amps.

Both players share a dedicated HDMI audio output with TMDS retiming, and both are genuinely universal in the old sense of the word: UHD Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD-Video, DVD-Audio, SACD and CD. Dolby Vision and HDR10+ are supported on the video side, with Dolby Atmos and DTS:X passed out as HDMI bitstream. A firmware release dated 2 November for the UDP800MKII adds SMB 2.0 support and gapless playback for APE, WAV and FLAC files, audioXpress reports. The MKII series also earned Roon Ready certification earlier in 2026.

A thinning field

The certification lands in a disc-player market that has been contracting. eCoustics reports that Reavon discontinued its 4K player line during 2025, and that Sony ended sales of its last dedicated 4K model in Japan in October 2026 with no successor announced. eCoustics also notes that Panasonic's DP-UB9000 holds THX Certification but does not play SACD — a distinction that matters to the particular slice of buyers who want one machine for movies and for a shelf of hybrid discs.

That context explains some of the interest in a certification announcement that, on its own terms, changes nothing physical. In a category where fewer manufacturers are shipping new hardware each year, a third-party test programme is one of the few external reference points available, and it is not surprising that a manufacturer would want the logo on the box.

How to read it

What the announcement establishes is that two players already on sale have passed an independent test suite run by THX, and that both companies are willing to say so publicly. What it does not establish is anything measurable. Without published results, certification functions as a pass/fail marker rather than a performance figure, and it carries no information about how either Magnetar compares with any other certified or uncertified player.

It also does not retroactively improve anything. An owner who bought a UDP900MKII or UDP800MKII before 3 November 2026 has exactly the same machine afterwards; a buyer purchasing one now gets the hardware described above, with the 2 November firmware available for the 800. Anyone weighing one of these players should be looking at the feature list — SACD support, the balanced outputs, the DAC complement, the HDMI audio path — rather than at the certification, which tells you that a lab looked at those things and did not publish what it found.

Prices above are the manufacturer's US suggested retail figures as reported by audioXpress; no currency conversion was required.