neil wilkes
2K Club - QQ Super Nova
Never had a 970 - the first DVDA player I had was a disaster as it turned out it could only play Group 1 and no others. Cannot even remember the make now.
Next up was a Yamaha somethingorother, which was fine & dandy on DVDA 5.1, but whenever you played anything stereo it automatically upmixed it, and no setting would make it stop. Weird or wot!
The third attempt was a Pioneer, and that was also dodgy so it got traded almost immediately for a Denon 1910, which on my one refused to play written discs so it was traded for a Denon 2910 that I still have to this day. A 3910 got added to the stash (we needed a player in the studio, as software DVDA players are flaky at the best of times) which is also still running.
We went Oppo for Blu-ray and got a superb BDP-83SE - the sole downside was that I had to buy an add-on circuit board for multi-region DVD & multi-Zone Blu-ray but it survives firmware updates so no real problem there and we got our 105 to get a second Blu-ray player in the studio - as well as it being network capable when we bought it the BDCMF functionality was still supposed to be there but by the time it had shipped this was already gone, replaced instead by the AVCHD trick - this has also now vanished, sadly, but it looks like this & ISO support may yet reappear via a danish website that - interestingly enough - was recommended to me by Oppo in the US when I asked how to make the player region & zone free as the place to get a circuit board to do the job & that again would survive firmware updates.
The 105 really is a superb machine, even with no ISO/BDCMF playback. It's currently running as a kind of server interface, as we have a 3TB HDD on the network (ethernet connected) that it reads very happily and along with a superb utility called "Asset UPnP" which allows it to read just about all audio files right off the PC (or Mac, if you are one of our fruit-loving friends) without copying them to the ethernet HDD in the first place (thereby allowing me to only put keepers on that drive, as well as being able to audition mixes over a HiFi setup without burning discs or copying files (one of the shared folders is the current project assets folder) so saves me stacks of time.
I also like the way it allows me to take the HDMI out from the satellite box and run the TV through the on-board video chips - it really does look a lot better, and whilst it is not a full "smart player" (who needs apps anyway) the built-in Netflix & YouTube (absolutely great for tutorials and again the quality is far superior to what you see on any computer version) come in well handy.
I won't go on about the audio quality - suffice it to say it is superb and leave it at that methinks.
Highly recommended, and Oppo's after sales support is literally second to none as well. It's hard to say enough good things about not only the players but also the company.
Absolutely, totally recommended to all.
