I recently had a few people over to watch a movie on my OPPO-205 to which I’ve added a linear power supply and improved IEC. We then went through my library of movies on Blu-ray and even plain old DVD and compared portions of them to their streaming equivalent on my Apple TV and Xbox Series X via my gigabit internet, courtesy of Ting. The video and sound goes through an Anthem 70, feeding a 77 inch Sony 4K OLED and a 9.2.6 system. My living room has very slowly become quite the man-cave….
We all agreed that with my setup, at least, the physical media looked, and especially, sounded noticeably better. Even older movies that weren’t at 4K originally had deeper colors with better contrast, and the sound coming out of the OPPO was less compressed, especially in the upper registers. The opening sequence of Maverick, for example, was so much more visceral coming out of the OPPO than when streamed via the Apple or Xbox.
Maybe this is due to compression employed by the streaming services? Maybe my streaming devices just can’t match the hardware of the OPPO? All I know is that I’m going to miss both the quality and the depth of selection that the Netflix DVD service provided. Sure I can still buy some physical media, but being able to have a high quality borrowing library was great all these years.