Motion artefacts are also extremely well handled on the whole, though scrolling backgrounds (or foreground objects moving against a fixed background) did look jerky at times. Staircasing of diagonal lines was noticeable by its absence, and there is little sign of the usual muddying of detail in moving areas. For the most part, noise was not an issue.

Despite the occasional appearance of MPEG artefacts, which to a large extent are inevitable, the player is notable on the whole for the consistency and solidity with which it treats the recorded signal. Colour transitions are handled cleanly, and difficult material - the subtle colour transitions you find in cloud scenes for example, or lapping water - are found to be reproduced particularly well.

Shadow detail found near the black end of the spectrum is certainly handled at least as well as my resident Yamaha HD ready DLP projector (the DPX-1300) was able to resolve them.

The sound quality story is no less impressive. Serious music listeners often use separate players for CD because DVD players fail to perform well with audio discs, perhaps a side effect of their internal complexity, high level of jitter (a universal player like this usually has a number of clocks, which can mutually interfere) and the amount of EMC that is floating around internally.

In this case, the player sounds firm and stable, with driving, propulsive rhythms, and an unusually solid feel, even with SACD which can often be a little soft centred when it is played through some of the lesser universal players.

Overall, the DV-137 is a superior DVD player, albeit one that is a work in progress when it comes to the playing back of multichannel SACD. Consider this if this is important to you and your disc collection. Keep checking with Arcam about this issue, which may have been settled one way or another by the time this is published.

As a CD and DVD-Audio player, the DV137 is difficult to criticise, and as a DVD player it is a high achiever. It is only convincingly beaten in my experience by a handful of much more expensive models that have exotic image processing from the likes of companies such as Silicon Optix.