Oppo as transport

What people fail to realize is the tonal differences, dont make a player better or worse as long as its acurate and has a flat response. Remember 2 different components can have flat responses and sound completely different. A few +-2 here and there changes the sound completely. Also less bass makes speakers appear to have better imaging. All equipement sounds different, that is why some love a component, someone hates it. And regarding cables, take a simple good Canare cable, put a Neutrik end on it, or even a 75ohm Canare end, you are getting a top of the line cable that will loose little to no loss or change in the signal(tiny bit in LONG runs). How will you beat this? A cables job is to get out of the way. The best cable is no cable. the Canare also features GREAT sheilding. Take the extra $1k that is spent on wire and put it into a better speaker. I know everyone has there opinion on this, but I honestly feel, someone puts a cable in that changes response, and makes there system sound brighter, warmer, what ever and its looked at as the cables awesome. Guess what, IT JUST PLAYED WITH YOUR FLAT RESPONSE! Is this better? Not if it sounds much different then the Canare/ Van damme cables. They are built to get out of the way, so you would have to wonder, why the big sweep in frequencys? This is the same as bass, added bass isnt better, neither is subttracted bass. You want a nuetral cable or you will be changing them everytime you change a component.

I know I mentioned Stereophile, but if theres one truth to high end audio nobody wants to admmitt its, Dealers and audio magazines have to make money. When is the last time you read a review that said this speaker sucked, dont buy it? Thats one thing that stuck out in the oppo transport. This is not a high dollar product by any means. Its actually priced/marketed to lower audio listeners(even that of best buy products). yet even Stereophile couldnt say bad about this player. Thats why Im giving it a shot. It may stink. I will now it looks like on Monday what to expect. Ill do my best to say exactly how it does, with no suger coating.

Sthomas12321, I don't mean to be rude, but let's please stick to the subject. You're about to start a whole new discussion here. That's not the purpose of my post.

Yes I've heard similar arguments about super $1/ft cables from Home Depot and diabolic secret arrangements between reviewers and manufacturers. Somebody even suggested that millions of audiophiles enjoying expensive cables must be under some kind of hypnosis. I can only say that I had $10, $100 and $1k speaker cables and there is a huge difference. What is happening inside of the cable is extremely complicated and I don't know what makes sound "silky" for example or why some interconnects add bass extension.
As for reviews in Stereophile - nothing is bad in absolute terms but they are pointing to differences between different brands like "This speaker has better extension but is more forward and has less precise imaging". I'm not saying that puting $1k into cables is better than into speakers but it's wise to put about 10% of total value into cables. There is a difference.

Audphile - Your are right. I won't mention cables again.

Audphile - let me answer point number 4 of your original post. Dedicated transports, often very expensive, offer very low jitter of digital signal. Average cheap player exhibits up to 3ns peak jitter what corresponds to about -85dB in sidebands it creates. Sidebands are very audible in-spite of extremely low levels, because they are not harmonically related to root frequencies. It creates "fuzzy" sound.
Many modern Dacs like Benchmark DAC1 have jitter suppression built in and almost completely ignore jitter (Benchmark has 3 Hz jitter bandwidth). Other than jitter and better mechanics I don't know of any other difference between expensive dedicated transport and cheap DVD player as long as it is bit transparent. DVD player might even have better tracking.