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.