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.

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.

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.

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.

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 !

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.