Oppo 105 and Hegel H160 DACs

Your Oppo dac becomes passive once connected to your Heggel dac however from my experience bluray/dvd/cdp are lousy transports their inner dac and complex electronic circuits add  noise and jitter. it’s  better to use pure cd transport and good coax cable to allow your dac to perform at its best capability.

This is nonsense. Do you have any noise or jitter measuremtns to back up this claim? You can use the Oppo as an excellent pre amplifier. The DAC inside is first rate.

The answer is it depends.  If your connecting your Oppo with the XLR or RCA outputs into one of the line inputs of the Hegel integrated then your bypassing the builtin DAC on the Hegel.  If your connecting to the Hegel via USB or some other digital input, then your using the Hegel’s builtin DAC. How are you connecting the Oppo to the Hegel? 

@nycjlee -- I'm using the xlr outputs on the Oppo

Those are analogue, so you are using the Oppo's DAC. If you want to use the Hegel's DAC you have to use the Oppo's digital output into your Hegel's digital input. I would expect the sound to be very similar or identical. However, the hard bit is to do a proper comparison. Apart from the fact that it should really be double blind, you have to make sure that levels are exactly matched (within 0.2 dB). Also, the gain between the analogue output of the Oppo and the analogue input of the Hegel should be properly matched to avoid clipping. If you use the digital connection you may hope that you avoid this issue, provided the internal gain structure of the Hegel is correct.

To claim that the Oppo can be excellent pre amplifier is nonsense, It is very good blu ray that can be a decent CD transport but certainly not great one .Pure CD transport with quality coax cable will upgrade the the dound by far.

Any data?

Tired of people asking for data they know does not exist.

if you can’t  hear differences between DACs, then either your hearing is not as trained or skilled as others or your system just does not have the resolution to reveal these differences.

agree totally that oppo does not make a great CD transport.  It can be an okay CD transport, but others, such as CXC, will be much better. 

Plenty of reviews that disagree with you. And to be up to date, here is the recent Stereophile one for the new UDP 205: https://www.stereophile.com/content/music-round-87-oppo-udp-205 Measurement data would help, as no human can discern what an Audio Precision vel sim. audio analyzer can.

Op, it looks like the others have hi-jacked your post, but my suggestion to you is to try both DAC chipsets and use the the output that sounds the best to you.
1) XLR output will use the OPPO - ESS Sabre DAC
2) USB or S/PDIF/Optical (digital connection) output will use the Hegel - AKM DAC
Good luck!

+1

@nyc- great call. Thanks to all for the advice. I love peeps on this forum! 

you might even find you like one DAC for certain music and the other for different music, and so easy to change back and forth...

Nobody said that the Oppo is not good gear it's a fine blu ray and if you have descent system without dac and CDP it can be a good  cd player too but if you have more serious system and good DAC you need more serious dedicated  CD transport becuse pure transport doesn't have analog circuits neither inner dac and that allows the player to transmit pure digital information from the CD with minimum jitter and noise to external dac.

So one kind of bitperfect is more bitperfect than another?

CD transport itself doesn’t have sound signature however there are very important things that determining how good the CD transport is : level of jitter, the quality of the laser lens, inner cabling , inner clock,the mechanical drive and so on ,so evantually the CD transport can degrade or improve the sound it depends on the quality of the transport .
So the answer is yes one kind of bitperfect coming from one gear is not necessary the same bitperfect of another gear.

Since using a green or purple pen on the CD outer edge (and black on the inner edge) improves the sound, generally speaking, and damping the CD tray as well the transport drive mechanism itself improves the sound, I conclude that there are lots of things wrong with CD transports, generally speaking. And I don’t even have to mention vibration isolation. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. "But what about the Reed Solomon error correction code?" 😳

I will not comment on Geoff’s nonsense. See here for the Oppo: http://archimago.blogspot.nl/2017/04/measurements-oppo-bdp-105-rca-xlr-hdmi.html

willemj, what nonesense? I had the Oppo. Hel-loo! All of the things I said about the Oppo transport and most other players and transports are true. You should get out more often. I hate to judge to harshly but apparently one are the one who bought into the whole perfect sound forever nonsense.

Where do these guys come from that indicate that all dacs sound the same and you need to see specs that will tell you which dac will sound better?
you don’t need to see any test results to know what sounds better, you have 2 ears that will tell you which 1 you like better. Who gives a s$&$ if reviewer a or reviewer b said about this piece or that piece? This poster owns both pieces and it’s so easy to compare each dac. Just get a good/excellent digital cable that at least equals the quality of the xlr cables you are using (don’t use usb unless you have to), and all you have to do is switch inputs on the Hegel while playing music. 

The Hegel H160 is an excellent integrated amp and do deserve better CD transport than the Oppo to perform at its best and I agreer with @bstehno the OP need to take his amp to nearest dealer and to compare different cd transports I do recommend the Cambridge Audio CXC a very good value for money and good coax cable of course is a must, Unfortunately many have a fixation for the Oppo but they don’t understand that first of all it is a blu ray not a dedicated cd transport ,the Hegel do deserve better transprt for music hearing and the Oppo should be left for what he was design initially -for watching movies !

Here's a but. I just bought the Oppo 105D at Best Buy open box. Not that happy with the sound compared to my older discontinued Rotel 1570 CD player, but could be my amp, a very old European Pioneer A-120D 100 watts per channel integrated amp (no one in the US has heard of it) with Vienna Acountics Mozart tower speakers. Amazingly, the Rotel, Pioneer, VA combo sounds significantly better than the same combo with Oppo 105D, sounded "thinner," go figure. Didn't make sense, so I swapped out the Pioneer for a $4500 McIntosh MA5200 integrated amp I tried out. Rotel, Pioneer A-120D and VA Mozart towers still sounded "fuller" than the Oppo, McIntosh and VA speaker (although the Oppo definitely had better definition, particularly in the bass, just more "thin" in the mid range and treble). I decided to keep the Oppo because I read such good reviews about its DAC as being even better than the Oppo 4K dvd's and DAC's 2x and 4x more money (and they are selling on eBay for 2X to 3x what I paid). But (here's the but), there's got to be some combination of amp and/or maybe speakers that will make my Oppo 105D sound much better than the Rotel, Pioneer, VA speakers combo I have now. I just don't know what next component to try to bring out the best in my Oppo 105D vs my current clearly less highly regarded components (maybe except the Vienna Acoustics). Any insights or suggestion on how I can get the best out of my Oppo 105D so it actually sounds as good or well it should sound etter than my current set up (I returned the McIntosh MA5200)? Thanks. Bob the aspiring Audiophile. 
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Don’t bother with the Oppo,if you’re looking for serious improvement the next step is a pure CD transport such as the Cambridge Audio CXC or other one if you can afford to spend more connected with good coax cable straight to the McIntosh 5200 that already has very good inner dac that will outperform  the Oppo dac :You’ll notice huge improvement at the dynamic range, transparency and agility.