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Oppo as transport

Looking to hear from those who have tried Oppo DVD player(any model) as a dedicated transport to feed an outboard DAC.

1. How is the performance of this DVD player as a transport?
2. What DAC are you using with it?
3. What have you compared the Oppo to?
4. What is the reason why I would need to go with a dedicated transport instead of the Oppo.

In addition to the Oppo, I will also be running a Squeezebox connected to the DAC3(or whatever dac I decide on).

I've been contemplating to put together a digital front end consisting of Oppo(probably their mid-line model) as a transport with most likely Marigo or Virtual Dynamics digital cable, into Bel Canto DAC3. Just looking for ways to have more flexibility than I have now with a dedicated CD player.

I used to have Bel Canto DAC2 with Sony DVP-S7700 dvd player as a transport. I liked that combo and Sony was a very good transport.

If anyone did any comparison between Oppo and any other dvd player, or a dedicated transport, please share your thoughts.

Thank You.
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audphile1 OP
4,892 posts
 
Undertow, I don't mean to doubt what you're stating here, but where did you find this info on a old vs. new Oppo players? Thanks
undertow
1,033 posts
 
Audphile1
Not sure what you mean? No second hand info here, I owned them all! The 970 was a decent silver dVD player and thats it... The new ones are a whole different animal and sound great. I had a wadia CD player by the way while having the original 970, no competition, however the new 980 is 95% of the wadia and even better being its universal and great DVD on top of it, and thats without an external DAC.
sthomas12321
408 posts
 
981HD. Bought it new from oppodigital.com Website.
sthomas12321
408 posts
 
I want to add, there are more things I do not like about the oppo. None of which take away from sound/picture, but troublesome none the less. Why not have a disable option in the menu for the volume control on the remote. Also why include those horrible sound effect modes and buttons on the remote? All this can lead to accidently pushing one of those buttons and hearing aweful sound. They are useless, and I cant believe there isnt a way to disable them if you arent going to use them, its to easy to press one of those buttons on accident. I also didnt like the delay selection process. You dont have feet, you have inches, and its you input the difference in inches from the main speakers-lame!

Goin back and forth between my Anthem avm 30's DAC's and the the oppo's with direct mode, its almost like anthem built the oppo.For the first time Ive came across, switching back and forth between the two pieces lead to both sounding so closely the same, I couldnt consistantly tell which was which in a blind test with my wife changing inputs at will.Something I have never not been able to do in the past. The oppo was slightly preffered in the end I guess, but just ever so slighly with 2 channel. Thats really saying alot. Is Anthem's 2 channel the very best out there? Maybe not, but its very very good! And to get the same sound out of a $225 player is crazy! Im going to order a ps audio $49 power cord for it, and also buy some preffered RCA interconnects(I never use rca anymore and only had some rca mit terminators laying around to use) and see what happens.

Ive found some good bargains lately with component sources.

-PS3 BLU RAY/upconversion
-OPPO 981hd cd/dvd/dvd audio/sacd
undertow
1,033 posts
 
Sthomas,
The most annoying thing about the oppo is the Autoplay function on the unit, even if you turn it off the encoding on like CD's and DVD's still make it play as soon as you close the drawer, add that to the feature's gone bad section.. but for

The 981 is only about 75% of the audio performance of the 980 the 980 was built with audio in mind, the 981 was not, so look into that the info is available...
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