Oppo 105 D vs. DAC-transport combination.

What a difference with the new power cord.
Hard to exaggerate how much better the Cyrus-Gumby combo sounds than anything else I’ve tried.

 

I admittedly haven’t read through this entire thread, but in my search for ’Oppo 105 and transport’ it seemed to be the closest topic.

I was bored one day & decided to try connecting my old Technics DVD-A10 as a CD transport feeding digital out via both coax & optical to BDP105. I also configured the DVD-A10 for no upsampling to 192/24; strictly 16/44.

My reason for trying was simply out of curiosity but also my desire to extend for as long as possible the duty cycle of the BDP105 transport, since it also doubles & triples its duty for Blu-ray & SACD discs.

To my surprise, the music from CD's came through with an amazingly uncanny three dimensional soundstage that by comparison, using the BDP105 transport did not exhibit as well a three dimensional sound. The DVD-A10’s coax connection sounded slightly better than the optical, but not by much. The noise floor was also noticeably lower & the music just sounded more organic & accurate with respect to pace timing & rhythm.

It got me wondering if the isolation between the two components is a contributing factor; any thoughts why?

Oppo 105 is an SACD player which has multi-channel analog out. If you use it as transport,  DSD will be downgrade PCM to external DAC. So you loose 1) multi-channel 2) more information from DSD.

I'm not using the BDP105 as a transport; instead I am using DVDA10 as a CD transport fed to BDP105 as DAC. CD's sound amazing with this configuration. Now the BDP105 is no slouch as a CD player, but the above setup just seemed to sound better in areas I mentioned above.

@ericjcabrera 

You have discovered, as have others, that the stock Oppo units are not the best transports.  A possible next step, if you want to try, is to rip your CDs to a hard disk.  It can be a small portable to plug into the Oppo.  Not only might you get better SQ (I can attest that it will beat the Oppo, but I cannot say re: the DVDA10), but using the Oppo software you will be able to control your listening from a phone or ipad.

Jumzhang is correct that SACDs will not go through.  That will require connection to a separate DAC.  But you will also have the option of borrowing and copying CDs from friends or public libraries.