Oppo Ceasing production

Still got em, for now. But they're going, fast.

I've got to plug Marston Records.  Ward Marston (world famous remastering engineer for 78s) has a small company which limits CD production to 1000 units each with very extensive research booklets.  He sells CDs at $18 each.  They generally consist of 1900-1950 recordings by opera singers and pianists.  Each CD may contain $50,000 value of 78s or even unissued recordings from the vaults such as Edison's 300 trial opera recordings on discs from 1910-1914.  

These will never appear on streaming without his permission.  He also remasters for major labels, NAXOS label and the defunct Romophone (similar as his Marston label, different recordings).   

It would be a terrible and historic loss to be unable to retrieve (enjoy) the greatest serious music recordings of the first half of the 20th century through CD reproduction.

@samosa Who Wrote:
"Since you old folk are feeling without hope for the future of high end audio because your Blue ray drives are becoming defunct, I wrote a post in Misc Audio about my (a millennial's) journey from low-end to high-end audio.

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/a-millennial-recounts-their-journey-from-low-end-to-high-end-....

TLDR: Thanks to Hi-fi streaming, high-end audio won't be dead anytime soon."

 


I'm 58 and have often wondered why anyone would want physical spinning media in recent years. I started streaming from internet radio nearly twenty years ago in the home and now I don't have to move to any particular city to get good radio. Like KROQ in Pasadena but live in Seattle? No problem! You don't even need commercial radio stations anymore since there is an embarrassment of riches for any style of radio that is internet only you can think of. One can spend weeks sampling them. I started ripping my Compact Discs (not so compact after all) to FLAC in 2002 to a server in my home and for a decade I have been buying lossless downloads wherever possible and avoid buying physical media like the plague.

Streaming audio was making inroads until the iPod distracted people. In 2001 Turtle beach produced a device that fits in with living room equipment and aesthetics in form and function that not only streams internet radio but mp3 and wm over SMB as well as wav. We pushed hard for FLAC support but never got it. Since many of us ran SAMBA on Linux someone came up with a clever way to make it transcode FLAC to wav on the fly when the Audiotron streams off the server. The Audiotron only sees them as wav and was delivered wav. I still use that today to stream internet radio by using a local xml file on my server and pointing my audiotron to it. Turtle beach had the foresight to know that Turtle Radio would not be here forever and built in a back door to set it to look over SMB for an xml file with a specific name. Yes my mythTV box, Logitech Transporter and other devices also do as well as my smartphones. 

About fifteen years ago I had a cellphone with a built in FM transmitter and as a proof of concept I streamed some of SomaFM's internet radio while driving 85 miles away to visit a relative. This was before UMTS which later evolved into HSDPA then HSPA for download and upload quality and now LTE, all being W-CDMA with different numbers of slots. Over edge it worked mostly with only a few dropouts over the 85 miles.

I am in the process of putting discless Alpines in my car and truck. There simply is no need for spinning discs. I can use bluetooth but will use USB instead by putting a jack inside my center console. This will keep it charged and allow media to be played from the phone akin to a cd changer not to mention provide internet access to the alpine. I rented an Infinti Q50 on a vacation and streamed internet radio the whole time. T-mobile does not charge for streaming audio from most internet radio providers. I can also put a USB stick in the usb jack if I am only playing my own stored music but my entire FLAC collection is copied to the micro sd card in my smartphone anyway. 

I became annoyed with having to get out a disc to play anything years ago. When digital storage and home servers became easy to come by it changed the game in my mind. I have A BluRay player but haven't used it for anything other than streaming movies, of course my Rokus do that better anyway. The few Blurays I own are in Matroska format on my server and my MythTV box plays them from my server so that is that. My server is 17" wide and 1.5" tall whether it has one album or movie or ten thousand on it. I'm using one of the two filesystems that prevent bitrot. Many do not realize this but CDs DVDs and other discs will NOT last forever as we were led to believe. Storing the music on a Copy On Write filesystem with checksumming and self correction is as close as we can get. As far as high end, networked audio being asynchronous has a better chance of being without jitter than a physical spinning media transport directly to the DAC, it's an added benefit to network audio.

I, too, am annoyed at having to do all the work to play my CDs and LPs.  Damn, I’m getting too old!  So  I’ve been investigating Network Streamers.  Came upon this thread about Oppo and after visiting the Oppo website, reading the bad news (they’re quitting manufacturing) and reading the potentially good news (they might make a run to manufacture the UDP-250), I started reading up in the 250.

Unless I am misunderstanding what Ive been reading, it does do streaming!  It has WiFi and it has an Ethernet connection and it is set up for Roon, one of the major software organizers for your  digital music.  I don’t know what would happen if  I wanted to subscribe to Primephonic, maybe it wouldn’t support that.  But, darn, it looks like it would provide the link between the digital streaming world and my two channel audio system in my TV room.  What else would I need to marry digital to my analog world?

So not to put too fine a point on it, my name is Allen and I am a system designer at the Magnolia Design Center Perimeter in Atlanta Georgia. I can get access to Oppo udp-205 for the time being, but at last count we were down to 38 in our warehouse in Virginia. I would certainly appreciate the opportunity to assist anyone who doesn't want to get gouged on eBay.