Oppo Ceasing production

@elizabeth , it will be great to hear a comparison between the Marantz and the Oppo, once you get it.
Of course the Marantz will slam the Oppo, but by how much? That would be interesting. Hope you can post this. Thanks in advance!!

if only because there are so many billions of discs existing in the world there will  be a decent-sized legacy market for physical media for the immediate future. however, i'd expect that market to shrink very quickly-- it's unusual to find a kid under 30 who has ever bought a cd--i surmise that oppo has the prescience to stop investing in a dying medium. what is more puzzling is that they're also stopping production of their headphone products (which are well regarded and seemingly high-margin) and would seem to have continuing viability.

" I'm going to be a contrarian here. People say physical media is dead but just look at the resurgence of vinyl. My sense is, that CD transports are the "digital turntables" of the future. I just traded my Ayre multi disc player for a dedicated transport. Of course, I type this as my 103D plays in the background and I just ordered a new disc from Amazon. I can stream as well but my sense is that physical media is not dead by any means."

+1
I had a "30 something" musician come into my house and listen to my "high end" stereo system and his first comment was "where are all the other speakers?" He could not believe you could get such a realistic sound stage with only two stereo speakers. He also could not believe the realism, as most of what he listens to is highly compressed MP3 stuff full of distortion through "ear buds". When I put on some vinyl, he was amazed that it rivaled digital sources for realism. Guess who is now looking to get into high end audio. The resurgence of vinyl and tube gear is not a fluke, although neither will be a "mass market" by any stretch. The high costs are a deterrent, however, and I think partly the downfall of Oppo Digital. Audiophiles may have considered their stuff a bargain, but in the age of $49 CD/DVD players and $150 BD players, the general market and public do not. Music servers have also contributed, particularly with Red Book, since a CDROM and computer to rip them are often much less than an Oppo transport (and the sonic results are superior as well).  

@garybx If you're simply using the Oppo as a transport to a DAC, you'd be better off with the 203 and swapping out the switching PS with a digital linear PS (~$200.  A straight swap - about 15 min of work, mostly to open up and close the Oppo, there are about 10 screws that have to be removed).  The 205 only really makes sense if you're using its analog outputs.  Otherwise, you're just wasting money for the most part. 

Oppo makes the Sonica DAC and im sure will see streamer/non disc players from them soon.

simao, If you connect a Aurender XL100 streamer (USB audio input), now you have the finest sounding streamer AND the Conductor app with built in Tidal as well, quite a upgrade for the OPPO 105/205.


Matt M

Since I couldn't decide whether to get a UDP-203 or UDP-205, I got one of each. Now I HAVE to decide which to keep. What are the main differences between the two units. In my case, my D/A cost more than the 205, and I'm very happy with its performance. Are there other advantages to the 205 that should sway my decision?

It occurred to me that despite my beloved Oppo105's clarity and flexibility, I rarely use it to spin discs, even with a 500+ cd library (I know, not that much at all). I usually stream Tidal through my phone or through my laptop via a 3.5-RCA connection.

And there are more and more network players, streamers, and smart tv's. etc. I mean, we stream Tidal through our 4K smart TV in the upstairs system and cd's are relegated to the dedicated audiophile system downstairs.

Yet I wonder why Oppo isn;t making the change to a media server, something like the Nait Uniti?

Bad news for those of us who, in addition to playing CDs and DVDs, use the BDP-105 as a DAC to play files from a NAD or attached storage. We can be sure that standards will develop beyond the current DSD which is, I believe, latest audio codec that it can process.

 

I believe that Oppo has stated that they will continue to support their products for warranty, service and updates, but owners of previous models to the last generation should expect the rate of such updates to decrease.

I may have missed it in this long thread, but I take it this means that there will be no firmware upgrades for the BDP105 which is a bummer as new and upgraded music codecs are introduced.

Does this mean that Lexicon is also ceasing blu-ray player production? :) sorry, old joke!

I think the combination of 4K and streaming services are the major culprits in Oppo's decision to jump ship. The price jump from DVDs to Blu-Rays years ago was somewhat of a shock, but there was still growth potential there. With the price of most 4K discs being around $25, very few people are going to get on that merry-go-round for the 2nd time. I'm
pretty sure Oppo has crunched the numbers and seen there's no future in producing hardware for discs that relatively few people are buying in numbers big enough to support the platform.

Glad I bought an OPPO HA-1 DAC. Hard find one now.

Anyone who pays over retail for a 205 is a fool IMHO

+2

Anyone who pays over retail for a 205 is a fool IMHO.

+1

There is someone on here selling a brand new in box Oppo 205 for...wait for it....$2600.00.  I sent the person selling the player a nice and polite PM saying that what he is doing is taking advantage of a bad situation and that he should be ashamed of himself for price gouging.  His response that he is much cheaper than the 4-6K they are selling for on eBay and that I am a jerk for stating the obvious.  What person in their right mind would pay that kind of money for it?  At the retail price, it is a decent product, but at 4-6K???  You can buy an Ayre or Esoteric for that kind of money.  Anyone who pays over retail for a 205 is a fool IMHO.

Jeff, I just saw your response. I really appreciate that. I know there's a few folks on this forum who are not too happy with me right now. Somehow our system allowed for the 205 to get oversold and we are now scrambling to fulfill the orders. I have been assured by members of our management team that these orders will be filled, but it will take until June to do so. We can hypothesize all we want about how this happened, but at the end of the day I have egg on my face and as a sales person, that is the most uncomfortable thing in the world, because our integrity and our word is all we've got. I have of course reached out to all of the folks who put down their hard-earned money on these units and refunds will be issued immediately to anyone who does not want to wait. I truly apologize for any inconvenience and for making promises that I'm unable to deliver. 

@tapesmith.

Did they charge you shipping?

I'm glad I got my order in - they're expecting completed orders to be delivered to the store by Wednesday, which we hope means that they'll be headed out of the store to us around the country.  They're now sold out system-wide across Magnolia, not just regionally from what I understand.

So close ...but no go.
I was in contact with Al from Magnolia AV about getting the OPPO 205.
He tried, took my info and said he'd let me know. He thought maybe there was a couple left. Nadda. The sales system wouldnt accept any more orders. I want to thank Al for going to bat for me, on his day off BTW. The man deserves a raise. As to the 205, I can only hope they do another production run.  

Jeff

The upcoming Panasonic DP-UB9000 looks promising. The player supports HDR10+, Dolby Vision HDR, Alexa and Google Assistant voice control (via a future software update), and 7.1 channel audio.

The emphasis will be on audio performance, with the DP-UB9000 having a dedicated audio power supply, a 'high-performance' DAC and an XLR balanced output. Housed in new vibration-reducing casework, a thick steel plate fixes the optical disc drive to the chassis to reduce noise during disc rotation.

It also features the latest HCX (Hollywood Cinema Experience) processor and 4K upscaling and HDR optimisation technology. 

Pricing is yet to be confirmed, but it’s expected to be around $1400. I guess only time will tell how this player stacks against Oppo 205.

Hi Allen, please add me to your UDP-205 list.  My Audiogon email address is up to date to begin the transaction.  thank you dan

I appreciate it everybody. You were all wise to act when you did. After tomorrow we will almost certainly be sold out. We were down to around 10 at closing time tonight. Better safe than sorry as who knows if Oppo will actually make another run. Looking forward to seeing that pallet full of Oppo show up later this week!

I'll also vouch for Allen (allenone973).  He hooked me up with a UDP-205 through Magnolia Audio-Video here in Atlanta with no price gouging.  I also bought a new UDP-203.  I'll decide which to keep and sell the other; I figured it is better to have two and not need one than to have none and wish I had bought.  I also have a BDP-203 that has given me 4 years of service.  

echolane:

Regarding the 205 and connectivity:

I will soon move into a rental and my listening/TV/HT room will belong to someone else. My 2ch music system has, until now, been separate from TV/HT surround sound system in the same room. My 2ch system will handle the audio from my video sources. Hopefully, the 205 will accept HDMI video input from my Dish network receiver ( or its replacement ) and send audio from both shiny DVDs and satellite to my Naim Uniti, either by its HDMI audio or RCA analog output, and send video from both to a TV via its HDMI video output (been using a projector for over a decade and haven’t shopped for a TV in 20 years...). Like you, I am both getting old and transitioning to the brave new world of music and video content without physical media. The 205 will be my last source component that spins discs. My grandkids like loading DVDs and looking at their cases, much like I was with lps and their covers. A hopeful sign for the future of physical media?

On Oppo, I get that their business model no longer made sense to their Chinese Overlords, but why not sell their designs and IP to another manufacturer ?  Something doesn't smell right.

I have this sneaking suspicion that this is a Chinese power play and we haven't seen the last of it.  Apple is completely dependent on mfg. in China by Foxcon among others.  How much of the mfg. process does Apple own ?  What if the Chinese want to play hardball with Herr Drumpf and say "no more" hardware for Apple but you can buy our Oppo iPhone clone ?  I don't see how we stop them since the Fortune 500 has very little on factories or labor in the USA for over 20 years.

The Communists / Mercantilists used to have a definition for Yankee Trader / Capitalists.  They said a capitalist is the guy who will unwittingly sell you the rope to hang himself with.  So true.  As Herr Drumpf would say "SAD".

ALLENONE973....
I'm also interested in a 205.  I'm at ninh1969@yahoo.com
Thanks,
Chris

@allenone973.

I placed an order for a udp205 via your design center on Wednesday and good with 1299 price. I was told $49 shipping. Others here are saying shipping was free?
Can you clarify please?

ALLENONE973...
I'm interested for sure.  I'm at hajeski@comcast.net
Thanks,
Jim

Jb0194

You mentioned the 205 solving connectivity issues for you.  I’m having a connectivity problem too. I want to combine digital and audio, two colliding systems, to my three more than decent stereo systems, only one of which has a connection to digital via my desktop computer.  I looked into buying Network Streamers (Naim and Linn)  and ran into major problems with Sticker shock, and I still needed at least one good DAC (more $$$)..  Now it seems that the 205 may actually be the link I need to “marry” my analog stereos with a digital source. Is that what you are thinking? Though I might need two 205s, one for my living room stereo, the other for my TV stereo.

“Interesting that you mentioned your 105 solving connectivity issues in your system. That benefit was a strong incentive for me to buy a 205. Remains to be determined if my system connection plan with the 205 pans out but, on paper at least, it may be an ideal hub to dovetail my tv/video and 2 channel audio.”

I can vouch for Allen - one satisfied client here!

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.

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?

@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'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.

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

Also that the investment in 4K was so high that they were forced to diversify their product line (headphones, Bluetooth audio  and DACs) to subsidize it but ultimately it wasn’t strong enough of supplemental sales.

I was reading that they spent considerable capital on investing and co producing the 4K chip and ultimately it set them up for a long term loss they decided was too much and therefore are closing prematurely in order to maintain service for existing customers for as long as they could. 

Guys, I read in one of the other forums that Oppo is closing due to lawsuits and copyright infringement issues. Apparently, the plan is close down Oppo and create a new company.  I guess only time will tell, if this is true.  

Just checked Oppo Website and there’s now a link to register for a potential 205 production run.

bobag:

Interesting that you mentioned your 105 solving connectivity issues in your system. That benefit was a strong incentive for me to buy a 205. Remains to be determined if my system connection plan with the 205 pans out but, on paper at least, it may be an ideal hub to dovetail my tv/video and 2 channel audio.

I was all hyped up when the 203/205 were first announced.  Then I found out that they dropped the Apps.  I was using my 103 to stream some hi-res of the internet.  After a few months, I finally decided to upgrade.  So, sold my 103 here and pickup up a 203 and a Roku.  The Roku doesn't support hi-res audio so now I do that listening on my computer.  After a few months I moved the 203 into the secondary system and picked up a 205.

I figured these are the last "spinners" I'm going to buy.  By the time they need to be replaced, hopefully 4k streaming w/hi-res audio has reached the quality of today's UHD Blu-rays.  Best Buy and Target announced that they will no longer carry CD's.  Walmart's not far behind and the selection on Amazon is also shrinking. Oh well, the world moves on.  

Glad to hear that there might be another production run.  I'm trying to justify the purchase of a pair of PM-3 headphones, but I think that they would be too big for the gym and I don't listen with headphones at home.  

I was considering upgrading from my 105 to the 205 because I believe they had improved the shared DAC situation in the 105.  Too late as their stock is gone.  My 105 is amazing and solved many connectivity issues I would had in my system.   
As far as the media disappearing, I don’t see that as a consideration as I have a fairly large collection of CD’s some of which are SACD’s. 

allenone973, is that NIB bdp-205 still available? If so, I’m very interested. Please PM me to let me know. Thank you in advance....

Very strange, but not unexpected given the elimination of features in the latest 200 series of players including direct access apps. Purchased my BDP105 for 1) performance to $ ratio, 2) multi-format disk play, 3) streaming and 4) two video outputs (I have a small 7” monitor at my listening position). It seems the parent company, BBK Electronics, is focusing on smart phones, MP3 & 4 players and other consumer and industrial electronics. For whatever reason, BBK didn’t sell the brand and continue as a third party manufacturer.