Magnetar

The surround channels are less important, mainly for ambience and movie effects like helicopters flying, so one could justify using a lesser chip in those channels, but it seems chintzy to do so, especially considering that this is not a budget player 

With the growth of mult-channel streaming perhaps it might be time to reconsider the notion of surround sound as only a home theater sound effects concept going forward?

Perhaps.

I listen primarily to Classical.  Most labels that specialize in multichannel use surrounds for ambience.  The rears try to emulate the reflections that one might experience in the concert hall from walls, seats and ceiling behind the listener.  There is at least one German based label-Tacet- that says the heck with that, and plunks the listener in the middle of the orchestra or chamber ensemble.  For a Tacet disc, I would want the same chip in all channels 

^ I don’t know where the future is going. Time will tell.

I was told by the Hong Kong Dealer that those were the same group of engineers from the Oppo Digital making the Oppo blue-ray players.

When Oppo Digital closed down the production line few years ago and those engineers didn't want to work on the Oppo Mobile phone production lines, so they introduced this new company Magnetar making the UDP 800/900 models.

I traded in my Oppo 205 and the old Anthem AVM 50v to a Magnetar 900 (upgraded version) and the Anthem AVM 70 8K. The set-up menu of the 900 is exactly the same as the Oppo 205 set-up menu. The dealer's room had the cut-out top side of the 900 and again looked 95% same as the inside of the 205. 

The dealer mentioned that the performace of the 900 is much better than the 205's desgin with 2 separate Power Supplies and ESS chips for the multi-channel output and 2-channel output. 

The 900 works very nice and fast and I am very pleased with the blue-ary part! But if you are a very serious music listener on CD or SACD, I would suggust that you have a separate set of Hi-Fi system. I could hear the big difference between them.

These are my personal opinion only.

Thanks for reading.