Onkyo BD-SP808

Onkyo BD-SP808 review

The Onkyo BD-SP808 THX-certified Blu-ray player has purpose. Designed from the rivets up to be nothing less than a bad-ass home theatre disc spinner, it's the designated driver for the brand's current line up of THX AV receivers and pre/power PR-SC5508/PA-MC5500 combo. It doesn't hold much truck with 3D or IPTV network portals and that's the point: it's all about movies and music. Think of the Onkyo BD-SP808 as the bastard offspring of Harry Knowles and Katherine Jenkins. Build quality is outstanding, with good old-fashioned attention to detail. The player has a solid machined fascia and rigid cover, ensuring that unwarranted resonances and wobbles just don't get a look in. The drive mechanism has been centre-mounted, for all the right reasons. The front fascia offers up an SD card slot and a fairy-tree assortment of status lights. On the rear is an HDMI v1.3 output, component jacks, phono video out (answers on a postcard if you can think of any possible use for this), digital coax and optical audio ports, and Ethernet. With an eye to the custom install market, there's also an RS232 port, and IR input/output jacks if you want to operate the player to feed a secondary zone, but the unit is out of range of the supplied handset.