September 14th, 2009 by 
adam
Written by: Worf101
First let me qualify that while I’m a BIG OPPO fan from my time with 931 upconverting DVD, believe me it they’d screwed the pooch on this one I’d tell you. Here are my impressions of the product from 3 days and intensive nights of diddling and fiddling.
Packaging and Swag
Packaged and shipped beautifully. Comes with all the cables and cords you need except 5.1 or 7.1 analog outs. Still, they give more stuff that some other companys do. The ole lady loved the OPPO tote bag. The remote is a clear upgrade of previous OPPO offerings. This thing is nice, just the right size, good button size, backlit with good ergonomics. Only debit is they put the backlight button on the lower right hand side of the unit, it requires a second hand to use it. Small quibbles though.
Initial Setup
Easy, peasey, nice and greasy. The setup routine is caveman simple and quite well done. You’d have to be pretty brain dead not to get some picture or sound out of this unit with this basic set up. Of course due to the variations of gear out there the advance settings will be necessary to “dial-in” to your own specific hook-up. Manual was/is marvelously well written and laid out. Did find a couple of menu items “out of place” in there but a quick check of the page before or after usually yielded the information.
Blue Ray Play-Back Visual
The unit ships with two set up disks, one for audio one for visual. The first Blu-Ray product I ever viewed at home was the visual demo’s on this disk. They looked “spectacular”. Puddin said “it’s like you can reach your hand in there and touch things”. I concurred. The first Blu-Ray movie we watched however “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” really didn’t impress me all that much. Perhaps it’s because it was letter boxed with bars on the top and bottom or I was sitting too far away? I don’t know. I watched a regular DVD the following day though and the upconversion was handled strictly by the OPPO and it was stunning.
Sound? Oh my gawd, while not quite as obvious as the switch from Mono to Stereo but damn close. My Onkyo 905, despite being a couple years old, is HDMI 1.3a so it handles all those fancy smancy audio tracks that Blu-Rays ship with and that Sir TT has painstakingly mastered. The difference between a DTS soundtrack and Blu-Ray was striking and stunning. Everything, music demos to movies was clear, articulate and just plain gorgeous. Wow.
Summary
Puddin’ was upset when I told her I bought a Blu-Ray player, particularly a $500 dollar one. But she thought the big screen was an extravagance now she can’t live without it. I’m sure that as we get more titles and experience with Blu-Ray she’ll feel about it like all the other tech I’ve bought the last couple of years. I’ll have to reserve any praise on Blu-Ray visuals for a bit until I see some more movies, but I’ve no reservations about the OPPO’s sound reproduction. It is mind blowing. No final grade yet but I’ll keep you all apprised.
Da Worfster
| From Oppo.com www.oppodigital.com Complete Media Support: - Blu-ray Disc - The high definition Blu-ray Discâ„¢ format provides pristine video and audio quality for your home entertainment. |
| Worf101 is one of our more active and knowledge members of the AudioREVIEW forums.
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September 17th, 2009 at 9:39 am
I’m a bit confused by the author’s tone at the beginning of the article. I was expecting him to blast this product, but instead he praised it.
Regardless, I’m glad to see so many positive reviews of this Oppo player. My current low-end Sony Bluray player stutters sometimes (it was a refurb), so its replacement is now an obvious choice.
September 18th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Not a bad review at all…. I’ve heard the sound from analogue outputs from the player is better than the digital connection.
However, I’m a bit lost - why would the letterboxing detract from the Benjamin Button movie?
September 26th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I thought the same as Mark’s comment from Sept. 17. I had to go back and re-read the intro. I then realized a typo of “it” where “if” was intended was the reason behind it. With the word “they’d” found where it is in the sentence, I’m quite sure the intro was supposed to read “believe me _if_ they’d screwed the pooch on this one I’d tell you”. That changes everything.
So, I get from this it’s a decent product after a few days with it. Tho, the output from BluRay didn’t seem to inspire. This however may have something to do with the content. I noted “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” was generally a very ‘dark’ film from a lighting perspective wen I saw it. On the other hand, I’d think that an attribute of an outstanding product would be that it could make dim/dark content ‘pop’ with a velvety sheen. So, I look forward to more thoughts from folks who’ve had more time with it.