SOUNDSTAGE! ACCESS REVIEWS THE McINTOSH MVP901 AUDIO VIDEO PLAYER
The McIntosh MVP901 is designed to provide years of home entertainment enjoyment. As Soundstage's Aron Garrecht discovered, it has been completely redesigned from its predecessors with "a new video engine, completely revised audio circuitry, [and] considerably more connectivity."
The MPV901 performed "at benchmark levels across the board." Noting that while no Blu-ray player can make a DVD look as good as a Blu-ray, the DVD images that the MVP901 sent to his home theater system "came as close to Blu-ray quality as from any Blu-ray player I’ve seen." When he watched a 17 year old copy of Almost Famous through other players, people's hair at times looked hazy and lacked details. But when upsampled through the MVP901 "edge detail, color, focus, and smoothness of image movement were all a cut above - and by a cut above, I mean the best I’ve seen from DVD... the MVP901 presented this and other films on DVD as cleanly, clearly, and vividly as I’ve ever seen."
This performance is also true of the front panel USB input where he watched almost two seasons worth of Game of Thrones upsampled to full 1080p resolution "without a glitch. The MVP901’s overall video quality was untouchable." With actual Blu-rays, the level of detail delivered by the MVP901 made him question "if I really need to move up to a 4K projector." When listening to just music, "the sound through the MVP901 was alluring, with vast, wide soundstages, excellent image specificity, and rich tonal colors."
The attention to detail and exemplary build quality make the MPV901 "the most luxurious universal player I’ve ever laid hand or eye on." Many people's buying decisions are based strictly on technical attributes, and the MVP901 has a long list of those, but for those who need a product "to be special, unique, and to unfailingly satisfy every time we power it up, I’m here to tell you that McIntosh's MVP901 is such a product."
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(Aron Garrecht / SoundStage! Access / March 15, 2017)
