Reavon UBR-X100 Ultra HD Blu-ray Player Review

Since Oppo left the disc-player space in 2018 to focus on smartphones, it feels like we haven’t seen a ton of new high-end Ultra HD Blu-ray players hit the market, particularly at the price points Oppo’s two Ultra HD Blu-ray disc players once sat.

Enter Reavon, a relatively new name in the consumer electronics space. But don’t let the unfamiliar name deceive you. Its parent company, Zappiti, has been designing and manufacturing professional grade audio-video playback and management systems for quite some time now. And with the exit of Oppo from the high-end disc player market, the company saw an opportunity to manufacture premium disc players to fill the void Oppo’s players left.

The Reavon UBR-X100, priced with an MSRP of $799, supports disc playback of Ultra HD Blu-ray, 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, DVD, DVD Audio, and of course CD. It can also playback files connected locally or over your home network through DLNA. Most common audio and video file formats are supported, such as popular ones like MKV, M2TS, FLAC, DSF, and MP3. The X100 has support for both HDR10 and Dolby Vision HDR formats which are, by far, the two most common HDR formats used throughout Hollywood.

Build quality overall is excellent. I particularly liked the high quality, tactile feel of the buttons on the front panel. The display is dimmable, with a font that is large and easy enough to read from far away. Reavon says the X100 uses a 3 millimeter-thick steel plate for the electronics and disc drive to sit on, which sits on top of the 1.3 millimeter-thick steel outer chassis. Not only does this make the case far more rigid, it also significantly reduces the amount of noise let out of the case when the disc drive is spinning. Suffice it to say, this is a very quiet disc player.

For connections, you’ll find a main and audio-only HDMI 2.0 output, an RJ45 ethernet port, an optical and coaxial SPDIF port, and a pair of USB 3.0 ports – one found on the front of the case and the other on the back. The included remote is large, with direct access to pretty much every feature or setting you’d want easy access to. It’s also backlit, which is super handy to have in a dark home theater. There’s no analog audio outputs. For that, you’ll have to step up to Reavon’s flagship UBR-X200, priced at $1,699, which is essentially the same player as the X100, except it comes with a high quality DAC and multi-channel pre-amp section, as well as SACD playback support.

Setup
When powering up the unit for the first time, you’re greeted with a simple, snappy and intuitive user interface. You have options to load your disc or to playback A/V files, either connected locally or through DLNA. Speaking of which, there’s no WiFi built into the player as far as I can tell, so you’ll need to make sure you have an ethernet cable routed to wherever you’re installing the player, otherwise this will be strictly a disc-only player. And similar to players from Oppo and Pioneer, there’s no built-in streaming app support like you get from brands like Sony and Panasonic.

In the settings menu, you’ll have access to set things like the output bit depth and chroma subsampling rates, as well as audio options to set the player to bitstream or output PCM audio. Connected to my LG B8 OLED TV, I did have to set the HDR10 and Dolby Vision settings to ‘On’ and ‘Forced’, respectively, for these formats to be output and correctly recognised by the TV. So you may want to check on these settings as well, otherwise the player might output a tone mapped HDR-to-SDR version of the video content like it did in my situation, which looked decidedly worse than the correctly output HDR10 and Dolby Vision video.

The X100 also loads discs insanely fast. This is no doubt in part thanks to the high performance, quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU found inside. With a disc already in the tray, I set a stopwatch to see how long it took to power the unit on from standby until movie playback began on my television. It only took 40 seconds for this to happen, which incidentally was about a minute faster than it was to find and stream the same movie on Netflix through the streaming app built in to my LG TV.