The Marantz UD9004 Blu-ray player will be considered outrageously, obnoxiously expensive by most people. At £5,500, chances are that it's not for you — or any of us here at Obsessable, seeing as how we're most of us lowly tech writers and not CEOs. But if you have the cash and you want the most extreme performance available, you might want to look into investing in this thing.

Of course it does most of the things any normal Blu-ray player would do. It doesn't have any extra-fancy special features. But what it does have is an ideal hardware configuration for both audio and video. It features a Silicon Optix Realta processor that upscales standard definition videos to 1080p like nobody's business, does pixel-by-pixel conversion, and various other extreme video and audio processing functions. If you're an audiophile, you can kill the video feed and dedicate all the hardware just to processing audio by switching to "Pure Direct Mode."

Wealthy tech enthusiasts can pick this one up in the United Kingdom and Japan as of July 2009.