Fred K wrote:

I've noticed a surfeit in the cost and availability of SACD's - prices are really cheap for some top notch music, often recorded in Europe with the cost for many disks below $12- with shipping no less!

I'm in the process of digitizing my vinyl along with ripping hundreds of CD's to my Mac, but I also like playing a single disk through my Cambridge CD+ player running through a Peachtree DAC. All is well with this.

I'd like to upgrade my digital source equipment and is seems that the value offered by the glut of SACD's make that a better choice for purchase than a stand-alone CD player, in terms of listening quality and flexibility to build my digital library. I am loading my music onto my iMac and playing it through the DAC, through my Rogue Sphinx integrated amp. Eventually I have a dedicated music server for all of this.

Very knowledgeable contributors to this forum have strongly recommended the NAD CD player for about $299 as a real bargain and more than adequate for my purchases.

Should I go the extra mile and instead invest in a combo CD/SACD player, like the OPPO 103 or whatever else someone can recommend? Is it worth the extra cost and is the SACD sound quality that much improved over the equivalent CD version (NB: I have not done many A/B comparisons of the two formats, but my colleagues strongly recommend the SACD format for overall audio quality)

Final note: I don't care about 5.1 video, blue ray, or any of the other surround sound fanfare. I care only about audio quality and the listening (and not visual) experience. Most SACD players seem to cater to this later category to accomodate watching movies with big sound. I'm not one of them.

Can some advice and direction be offered here? It would be greatly appreciated.

There are lots of ways to skin that cat, but the OPPO BDP-103 plays everything and does a very good job of it for only $499.

The BDP-105 is MUCH better-sounding than almost any other player you can get for under $1500, however. Its sound quality is superb.

It makes both regular CDs and SACDs sound marvelous. It has state-of-the-art chips that really get ALL of the music off of the disc.

Until very recently (the last 3 or 4 years), you had to spend $6000 and up for a player that had the processing power to really make CDs sound wonderful, but now the BDP-105 is truly a superior player at a reasonable price ($1300). Get one if you can afford it and really want to make your CD collection come alive. I sold my $6000 Ayre player after I heard the new OPPO; $1300 is a bargain if you have a large CD and SACD collection and want it to sound like it never has before.

The simple fact, which most people do not appreciate, is that the basic CD format is really very very good. It has been bashed mercilessly for the last 40 years because 99% of the CD players absolutely SUCK!!! They just don't have the high-quality processing circuits to get the music off of the disc without errors and distortion.

When Sony/Phillips brought out the CD in the 1980s, they called it "perfect sound forever', and on paper it is true. What they didn't realize was that it would take 40 years before the available playback circuits started to fully bring forth and fully unlock the music on the discs without spending $10,000 or more on an exotic player. They thought playback technology would catch up to the medium in a few years; boy, were they ever wrong!

Case in point; I have a disc that I bought the same day as my first Magnavox (Phillips) CD player in 1985. For 30 years or more I thought the disc sucked. It DID suck on every player I played it on for all those years. On the BDP-105, it sounds wonderful; right up there with some of my best LPs. It is the first CD Delos ever made; "Nothin' But the Blues" by Joe Williams- Delos CD-4001. (Delos, by the way, used the Soundstream recording system from the start; not the crummy Sony digital recorders in vogue then)

Oh; and for those of you who are using the 99% of all CD players that have low-cost or outdated chips that do a lousy job:

IT AIN'T THE CD THAT IS THE PROBLEM, SO QUIT TRASHING THE CD FORMAT; IT IS YOUR CD PLAYER THAT SUCKS.

GET a BDP-105 and find out what is really ON your CDs!!!!

I am annoyed as hell when people tell me how great their LPs sound and trash the CD, and then you find out that they are playing the LPs with a $3000 setup and comparing that to a 10-year-old CD player that cost Maybe $400 or less. Duhhhhhhhhhh. Not exactly a level playing field!

And by the way; I find that with the BDP-105 the regular CDs sound so good that SACDs are only marginally better (I have around 100 SACDs and around 1400 regular CDs in my collection).

The Oppo is okay at best. I prefer a dedicated CD spinner, as well as, a dedicated SACD spinner.

IMO SACD and other high-res formats do not necessarily sound better than CD. It depends on the mastering and recording.
I have CD's which sound perfect, and SACD's and audio blu-rays which sound like crap.
And there is nothing about a dedicated CD player which would make it better than the Oppo 105 D.
The Oppo has state of the art transport, lasers and DAC's. There isn't anything better in a dedicated CD player.
If the SACD sounds better,it's because greater care was taken in the mastering,not because of any inherent superiority of the medium. No one has ever been able to hear any difference between the formats in double-blind testing.

I have it and it's an amazing machine. even if you don't care for the bluray part.
It makes cd sound wonderful...most Sacd do sound better than the cd version but that's because better care was given in the recording and mastering.
Most of the Sacd I bought do sound better...more analog-like sound. How do i know? I put it in the Oppo 103 and i play the Sacd "layer" than from the Oppo 103 options I switch to the cd only "layer" of the same disc. The difference is there...some more than others.
Having said that some Sacd were just a rip off from sony or universal....and actually sounded worst than the previous cd versions! I soon found out that reading the amazon reviews does give you a pretty acurate idea of how good the sacd will be.
One thing to remember is that the Oppo 103 can be controlled from your smartphone...including the volume so it can perform like a preamp for the whole system. Basically you just put your amp to say 80% power and then control the volume of your system with the smartphone...it's very convenient.
It gets better...with the latest firmware you can actually stream whatever music you have on ur phone (up to cd quality) directly into the Oppo and since it gets processed by the player's internal Dacs it sounds amazing!
Also...don't underestimate the fact that with the Oppo you can set the individual speakers and subwoofer level...and also the distance to the listening position.
It works amazingly....you won't believe how centered and focused the image gets if you take time to measure the sound level of each speaker and adjust accordingly! In my case I have to compensate one speaker by 1db...then the singer is dead center between the speakers!

I have a Marantz UD 7007 which plays all the formats and I am really disappointed{so far) with audio blu-rays. I have six of them so far; Neil Young "Psychedelic Pill"
Supertramp "Crime of the Century"
Diana Krall "Look of Love"
Beck "Sea Change"
Supertramp "Breakfast in America"
Amy Winehouse "Back to Black"

None of them sound particularly good. I think they all have compressed dynamic range. The Neil Young disc has awful SQ.
I own "Crime of the Century" on vinyl, and it has better sound than the blu-ray. The best sound quality I own is four vinyl LP's;
Norah Jones "Come away with me"
Eric Clapton "Unplugged"
Robert Plant "Raising Sand"
Daft Punk "Random Access Memories"
Also, the SACD "Slowhand" by Eric Clapton has excellent SQ and the SACD of the soundtrack music from "Blade Runner" sounds amazing. Why does most non-rock,non-pop music have better SQ ?

I never heard the stock Oppo 103, but I was one of the first customers of the Oppo 103 the day it came out. It went immediately to Electronic Visionary Systems in California for the full tilt mods on analog and digital circuits and whatever else he did to the Oppo, which included eventually the Linear power supply with huge toroidal transformer, Panasonic caps for the PS, high speed clock, and Audio Magic anti RFI/EMI device. And later on the Oppo 103 received full treatment of WA Quantum Chips, Marigo VTS dots, Moingo discs for the CD transport compartment, cork isolation for the circuit boards, mu metal wrap for the transformer, and other tweaks. And the Oppo 103 was isolated mechanically on one of my spring based ceramic tile Isolation stands Was this the world's most modded Oppo 103? Probably.

Geoff Kait
Machina Dynamica

Allen Fant wrote:

The Oppo is okay at best. I prefer a dedicated CD spinner, as well as, a dedicated SACD spinner.

"OK at best"???

I have an extremely high-quality sound system, and that is ridiculous IMO.

I think it is the best I have ever heard. I got rid of my $6000 Ayre player after hearing it, because it was definitely better.

I also see that the Sony SCD-XA5400ES has been put back into production and they are rating it A+ I suspect that this must be a redesigned model, because I got rid of one several years ago; it was good, but couldn't touch the OPPO BDP-95/105. They were out of production on it for at least 3 years, and then brought it back. i wonder about that.

They also seem to have lumped the OPPO 103 and 105 together in the ratings, which confuses the hell out of me, because the DAC chips and sound quality of the 95 and 105 are way way better than the 103.

Go figure.

Hello David Harper
Can you tell how you made the Marantz UD 7007 region free? I´m having trouble playing Blu rays from the US

My Marantz UD 7007 is in the garbage dump. The tray and transport stopped working. I was so angry at it after all the glitches(sometimes it didn't recognize the disc,sometimes it froze) that when the tray didn't come out any more I had to pry it open with a screwdriver to get my disc out of it then I tossed it. I replaced it with an OPPO 203. The best player I have ever owned or heard.

geoffkait wrote:

I never heard the stock Oppo 103, but I was one of the first customers of the Oppo 103 the day it came out. It went immediately to Electronic Visionary Systems in California for the full tilt mods...................................
................. Was this the world's most modded Oppo 103? Probably.

Probably but it is presumptuous to assume it was improved.

by the way, as soon as you get a chance, everyone, get the Blu-ray movie "Wonder Woman". It's EXCELLENT!! The best movie I've seen in a while and I don't normally like super hero movies. And Gal Gadot in the lead role may be the most exquisite human being I've ever seen.

Kal Rubinson wrote:

geoffkait wrote:

I never heard the stock Oppo 103, but I was one of the first customers of the Oppo 103 the day it came out. It went immediately to Electronic Visionary Systems in California for the full tilt mods...................................
................. Was this the world's most modded Oppo 103? Probably.

Probably but it is presumptuous to assume it was improved.

I had the Ayre player for years, and it was pretty good (maybe an 7.5 on a scale of 1 to 10). Good for $6000 in 2006.

The OPPO BDP-95 replaced it, and sounded slightly better (an 8, maybe), but still not as good as one could wish for.

I recently got the new Marantz SA-10, and it is so good that one can't really find ANY fault with the sound; it is a 10 all the way. Playing the best vinyl records and then the same CD gives me virtually the same sound,
and it is wonderful wonderful. They have really hit the ball out of the park with this one. The dynamics and detail are jaw-dropping.

I also recently got the OPPO UDP-205, to replace the BDP-95, and it has much improved sound over the 105 and 95; 9 out of 10. For $1300, it is certainly a world-class bargain. If you can't afford the SA-10, this is the one to get.

(just for reference, my system is the Audio Research LS-26 preamp, the Musical Fidelity M6PRX amp, and the Vandersteen Treo speakers.)