It's a funny thing about universal players.

They were all the rage a couple of years ago, but now the importance of SACD and particularly DVD-Audio seems to be waning fast.

Which, according to Arcam, makes this the perfect time to release a trio of universal players, the DV135 being the cheapest.

In fairness, there is some logic to the decision when you dig a little. SACD and DVD-Audio represent the high-water mark of music replay on disc, and although Blu-ray and HD DVD high-definition video players and discs are in the stores, it's still very early days for those formats.

So the DV135 takes the things we've already got in great numbers - DVD-Audio, DVD-Video, CD and SACD - and runs with them as best it can. These days, that means stereo replay in analogue, with digital audio outputs for PCM audio from CD or DVD.

Hi-res audio signals from SACD or DVD-Audio are locked within the player. HDMI is deployed very conservatively, with Arcam sticking to version 1.1 here. This means nothing if you use the connector to wire your player to a screen, and it allows PCM stereo and Dolby Digital multichannel to pass, but it won't support discrete digital multichannel systems. In short, there's no digital SACD multichannel output.

This is a transition product, reflecting the state of flux in the AV industry. On the audio side, we still retain the Toslink optical and coaxial digital outputs and twinned pairs of gold-plated phono sockets.

Output overload

However, things get twisty with the video inputs - there are composite, S-Video, component video and Scart sockets for analogue outputs and HDMI for digital output. Also, to suit an increasingly connected world, the DV135 has trigger and remote jacks and an RS-232 port.

True to form for Arcam, there have been no changes to this player's external appearance or its long, thin remote. It's part of the DiVA range, and shares a lot of technology with its bigger DiVA DV137 and FMJ DV139 brothers.

It retains the Wolfson 8740 24-bit, 192kHz DACs, jitter-reducing high-precision clock and toroidal transformer of the DV137 and features the same Zoran Vaddis 888 video processing as the FMJ player.

So, what's missing? The DV135 skips on the interestingly named technologies that go into higher-end Arcam kit: 'Mask of Silence', 'Stealth Mat' and the 'Acousteel' chassis.

This might make it a fraction more prone to the ill effects of vibration and electromagnetic interference, but unless you watch DVDs beneath a radio mast in an earthquake zone, we doubt you'll notice. In addition, on the video side, where the more upmarket players have a dedicated scaler and even de-interlacer, the DV135 assigns these tasks to the Zoran video chip. It'll still zap up the picture to 1080i-grade performance, but the magic 1080p figure eludes it.

The video menu suffers from no omissions, being complete and highly configurable. The booklet comes with a little blue filter you place over your eyes when running through the installation routines, which enables you to drill deep into unexplored video territories.

It's a four-way love-fest inside the DV135. No matter which format you choose to play, it turns in a remarkably consistent performance. The days of 'great DVD, shame about the CD' appear long gone if this player is anything to go by. At least, that's the initial impression.