Useful tweaks for Oppo 980/DTC 9.8 for MC-SACD

I am running a 981 to my 8.8

I have done the following - never did A/B before and after, just sort of did it by reflex

I used the Verastarr damping material liberally inside the case. Its one of those sheet metal jobs that goes thonk when its stock. Now its more like thud

I use an Oyaide C7

Because space is extremely limited I use a set of Herbies Tenderfeet underneath it - I would top load if I had room as well

I run a Wireworld HDMI out

As I said, no A/B but it works really well

Waiting on the new Oppo BluRay - assuming that it will also play DVD well, I will scrap the 981 and the Pannie BD30 for the one unit. At that point I may also consider a modder upgrade package

have a look at the oppo thread with the last post on 12-19-08. Joe is a vse agent and what he does to the oppo betters the sony 9000 vse at level 6 in his opinion.It is truelly a giant killer

I just found a fairly inexpensive tweak for the DTC 9.8 that seem to provide a decent improvement in audio quality. I saw that MusicDirect had Marigo VTS dot sets on sale for half price. I bought the one for a DAC. It comes with 10 3mm green dots for capacitors, 10 2mm white dots for solid state components (ICs, voltage regulators, DACs, etc). 4 6mm black dots for the chassis front and rear and 4 2mm green dots for chassis top and botton.

I put the 3mm green dots on top of all the large capacitors, I put the 2mm white dots on the voltage regulators (ones with heat sinks), HDMI chips, Toshiba DAC.
Installing the dots is a little tedious as they are so small, but using an exacto knife helped.

After completing the install, my first test was a MCH SACD of Diana Krall - Girl in the Other Room. I found quite a few areas of improvement. The lower bass had more definition and weight. More clarity in the midrange and transients seemed less smeared. Overall it seemed more like I was listening to real people playing real instruments...I then popped on several Telarc MC-SACD which confirmed my initial impressions. Then I switch over to my AppleTV streaming Apple lossless files connected to the DTC 9.8 via toslink. In the past I have found this source to be less than wonderful. OK at low volumes...but strident as I would increase the volume. Now it is quite enjoyable...and more musical.

I was hoping to move the DTC 9.8/Oppo combo closer to my my VSE Mod 4 Sony DVP-9000ES through my 2 channel Air Tight ATC-2 tube preamp...In stereo mode it was not very close before...They have definitely moved closer...too soon to tell yet exactly how they stack up.

A pretty impressive improvement for $50 and a couple of hours...I have used Marigo VTS dots previously, years ago in my 2 channel system on DACs and preamps with pretty good success. Seems like it applies to the DTC 9.8 as well.