High Quality Universal Player??

I think Oppo or Cambridge Audio players would be all you'd ever need if they're within budget. The Oppo BD105 is a bit of a Swiss Army Knife but it might be nice to have all those input and output capabilities for some time in the future. I own a CA 751BD which, to echo Willland's post, is a very reliable machine and its video performance is very good indeed--it upscales DVDs to nearly Blu-Ray standard. However, I've found its audio performance could stand some improvement. I'm using an outboard DAC for PCM formats (CD, DVDa, video DVD, Blue-Ray, etc.) but since my DAC doesn't have DSD capability, to play SACDs I have to rely on the CA's own decoding which, to my ears, is rather shrill and piercing.

It looks like Cambridge Audio's newest player, the CXU, can do most of what the Oppo does, minus some streaming capabilies. It seems that the two machines use different DAC chips though, with CA opting for Wolfson WM8740 chips (the same ones that are in my 4-plus-year-old 751bd) while Oppo uses ESS Sabre32. Poking around a bit, I discover that there's a newer and probably more capable Wolfson chip available (the WM8742) and I'm wondering if CA might be incorporating this into a future player or whether it's worth waiting for in the first place? Anybody know this DAC chipset or have an opinion about it?

Had to look around a bit for the specs, but the CA player has a 24-bit DAC chip instead of 32-bit, which I think is what the author was trying to convey but with clumsy wording. The CA player has not just one, but 5 Wolfson DAC chips (one for each available channel). As far as I can tell, neither the 751bd nor the 752bd players can be configured as separate DACS, but I believe the Oppo can (and possibly the CA CXU as well) on account of their expanded input and output capabilities.