$135,000 Blu-ray Player Is Expensive

If you thought Blu-ray players were expensive before, take a look at this one.

Goldmund is a company that, according to its website, is dedicated to the accurate representation of sound and image. To do this properly with a Blu-ray player you apparently have to spent a whole lot of money. The company is selling its second Blu-ray player, the Goldmund Eidos Reference Blue, for $135,000.

The Goldmund Eidos Reference Blue should probably cost $135,000 just due to name alone, but backs up the cost with its construction too, I guess. From Goldmund’s website, the product features:

• Improved Mechanical Grounding construction with sturdier table support.
• Built-in stabilized power supply using the Goldmund AC-Curator circuitry, totally separated from the mechanism by the top of the table support.
• Goldmund “Magnetic Damping” technology, considerably improving the image stability and sound transparency.
• External aluminum transport rigidifying structure for spurious vibration cancellation.
• Heavily damped brass and aluminum heavy-duty mechanism enclosure (30kg) suspended on 4 spring loaded suspension pods.
• Audio outputs:
  * RCA Spdif coaxial digital.
  * Toslink Optical Spdif digital.
  * 2-channel analogue RCA unbalanced.
  * 6-channel analogue RCA unbalanced.
• Video outputs:
  * 3 RCA analogue components output.
  * S-Video analogue video output.
  * HDMI 1.3 Video and Audio digital output.
• Size: Height 75 cm (30″), Width 59 cm (23″), Depth 55 cm (21″).
• Weight: suspended: 30 kg, total including table: 82 kg.

Does the work put into the construction of this player actually warrant the price somehow? Or the audio and video output? I can’t see even the richest of the rich actually feeling the need to purchase this product, though maybe I just don’t get it. It definitely looks like a spaceship, so maybe it has a secret dual function.

If you’d like to purchase a Goldmund Eidos Reference Blue, you’d better book it to the nearest Goldmund retailer. It’s a very limited edition product, as only 50 units will be made. Heck, it also plays DVDs and CDs if that makes it float your boat, and is multi-zone and multi-region.

So what doesn’t it do? Connect to the internet or support BD-Live. Yup, this Blu-ray player is apparently stuck as a Profile 1.1 and cannot be updated. Both the $299 PlayStation 3 and other retail Blu-ray players have the capability to connect to the internet, so why doesn’t Goldmund’s “ultimate” version of one?

Via: Gizmodo