OPPO BDP-95 Universal Audiophile 3D Blu-ray Disc Player

• Unparalleled Video Quality powered by 2nd Generation Qdeo Video Processing
• Diversified Media Support - Blu-ray, DVD, CD, SACD, DVD-Audio, HDCD, WAV, MKV, FLAC & more
• World's best performing 32-bit audio DAC solution - ES9018 SABRE 32-bit Reference DAC
• Balanced XLR & Toroidal Transformer for superior audio signal quality & power efficiency
• Ultimate Convenience - Dual HDMI, IR In, RS232, USB, eSATA, DLNA & more

This review is based on a few weeks experience in a system powered by 5 class A monoblocks and 2 custom sub towers. The speakers are B&W dual 8" three way towers at the corners and the matching center. I've also reviewed a top of the line Marantz universal player. It was in the system at the same time as my older Oppo BDP-83SE Nuforce edition. That Marantz, in spite of retailing for 5 times the price couldn't match it. The 83 is still in the system and I bought the 95 for its 3D capability plus streaming functionality. The 95 sounded good out of the box. My father was visiting and even he noticed it on the first song. Now after a few weeks of burning in this thing has blown my doors off. I've never heard such a good sounding digital source. With an extensive collection of SACD, DVD-A, and CD music also ripped to uncompressed WAV files I've tried every worthy format with this player. I can't believe how good CDs sound on this thing. The high resolution stuff is other worldly. Uncompressed WAV files played over wired ethernet sound as good as the disc when played the old fashioned way. Maybe even better. Make no mistake, I've never heard a better digital source at any price in my system. I haven't tried the Ayre so if you want to spend $7K, go for it, and please report your findings.

Drawbacks? The only two I can find are the fan which makes the tiniest amount of noise and the streaming functionality. While it sounds great it requires a UPnP server. You can only pull music from the server with the 95. You can't "push" files from your server to the 95. So when you're playing bands like Pink Floyd there's a gap of time between tracks which is not at all how the band intended their work to be heard. So for those titles I just spin the disc. The fan is noticeably quieter than the one on the 83. My listening position is about 7 feet away from the 95 and I can't hear the fan if there is any other ambient noise. This is not the case with the 83. Oh, and it's made in China. That sucks but most other electronics are also coming from China. As much as I hate feeding that dragon I'm equally serious about music.

Finally, in comparison with the 83 Nuforce, the bass is substantially more extended, there's more "air" around instruments in the upper frequencies, and the imaging is just amazing. Even with CDs I can hear the individual positions of instruments. Everything just takes on a clarity that I've never even heard before. Dad thought it was a little bright at first but I measured with test tones. It's flat as can be. But that upper end is beautifully clear. For context this is a $1000 player bringing out the best of a six figure audio system. If you have a serious system and you're using analog interconnects prepare to pick yourself up off the floor.

The video performance is superb in DVD, BR, and 3DBR formats. I don't know that it's any better than the 83 but the 83 won't do 3D. If you look at other online reviews you'll find this unit's video performance ranked as highly as any other BR player and higher than most. If all you're after is video quality then buy the BDP-93. It has exactly the same video performance for half the price. But if you're a die-hard like me and are using a multi-channel high-end preamp with analog audio connections this is your player. You won't be sorry. If you're replacing a $10K player and don't like the 95 you have 30 days to return it. It'll only cost you shipping. This player is all about the sound delivered from the analog outputs. If you're using a receiver and plan to connect with the HDMI, don't waste your money here. Get the 93 because the big performance from the 95 is on the analog side. At $1000, I am utterly amazed. Thank you Oppo.

Buy OPPO BDP-95 Universal Audiophile 3D Blu-ray Disc Player Now

I went through two Denon 2930 12 bit players. Both 'died' within a couple of years. I thought they produced a good sound until I heard this Oppo. It is 32 bits and the difference is simply amazing. The player runs only $150 more than the Denon but the sound...the sound. I am hearing music I never heard before, the sound stage is much broader with individual placement of the instruments in the orchestra, a clear, rich bass. I could go on but you get the idea. I use the player for my CDs and SACDs and not for video so I can't speak to that aspect of the player but I cannot get over how much better the sound is. A friend of mine, Al Franz, used to say about LPs, "There's more music in those grooves than we hear on regular players." Apparently there's more music in the binary codes than I've been hearing. Now I have to relisten to all my CDs....given that is around 3,000 this will take a couple days....Stumpf

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I have, and still use, a 200 disc Sony "megachanger" running through an Entech Number Cruncher d/a converter. The Number Cruncher isn't the last word in resolution, but it is astoundingly musical for the $130 I paid for it on eBay. It makes the cheap carousel sound like a Wadia or an Ah! Njoe Tjoeb or many other players costing ten times what I paid for the player/converter combo.

But this thing sounds better. I have the video going through HDMI, but play audio through the analog outputs to an analog channel of my Marantz 7005, and from there through some nice Kimber Kables to my somewhat vintage, but perfect, KEF Reference monitors. The Marantz is really, really good for a receiver in its price category, yet it feels cheap for the Oppo, which actually costs about the same or a little less. Shouldn't your amp/preamp combo cost at least twice what a source component costs?

No matter. I'm sure with the pure signals provided by this player, I could get far more refined sound with an investment in more refined downstream components, yet I feel no need to do so. The Marantz and the KEFs work so well together that music already sounds beautiful, well-defined, butter-smooth midrange, deep, fast, powerful, clean bass and clear, non-fatiguing highs. The Oppo is impressive because it gives me even better sound than the Entech does, and it's not even a purpose-built CD player. It accesses my network music collection effortlessly, and if I cared enough to take all my CDs and make ALAC files of them, I'd retire the carousel permanently. As it is, I do encode about half my music collection--anything that starts as a high quality file that has significance or great sound to me. My Zone 2 speakers can play all of it, using iPhone wifi integration for control. I love that. I just wish my network setup allowed for slightly faster streaming of files from the network drive. It gives full resolution but with a little pause to buffer each track.

I'm sure in the future all home music collections will be networked, and you'll be able to buy and download ALAC/FLAC files or similar hi res recordings for every tune you wish to purchase. The iTunes model is inadequate for this, and the physical disc model is disintegrating before our eyes. iTunes can handle stuff from your own CDs ripped to ALAC but it gets finicky with lossless files purchased from legitimate not-Apple sellers. We're in the infancy of the fully wireless, streaming, mass-storage era. We want to stream high resolution music to our iPhones and iPads, to all the music devices in our homes. It's not all the way there yet. But the great sound coming out of this device, which can be the d/a converter for all your digital audio and video, coupled with its best-ever networking capacity, make it a huge step on the path to full central home audio and video at your fingertips.

If you're searching for a great home digital file streamer, and a fantastic blu ray player, you can get them both in this device.

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Originally posted on Amazon in a region free version of the same player on 3/22/12

My main purpose in buying this player was for hi-res audio; I don't even own a hi-def television. I was hoping to find a relatively inexpensive player (by high end standards) that would make hi-res music sound better than cd's currently do on my cd front end. It's replacing a Pioneer DV-578A that was great for the price, but was of lower sonic quality than the rest of my system.

I'm now at around 5 weeks of the unit being powered up for burn in. I'm using the Shunyata Venom power cord, & a 90's Tara (unbalanced RCA) "Analog Standard" interconnect.

While very sensitive to the mastering quality of what it's playing, on hi res this puppy is STAGGERING. I am stunned that this level of musicality is available at this price point. The only better front end I have ever owned was an entry level (around 2k in early 90's dollars) Well Tempered Record Player with a Blue Point standard; & that is based on a very OLD memory as I had to sell the TT in 1995.

2 tips for new owners:

1. People have told me it needs 100-500 hours of burn in before it sounds it's best. That has been my experience also. While it actually sounds quite good right out of the box, at 5 weeks it's still getting better & better.

2. If you plan to play iso's, make sure you have firmware dated no later than 12/11 (P9x-61-1219). Oppo has been forced to remove this capability starting with the 1/12 firmware release. One person states that Oppo's don't allow flashing to older firmware; so for some people this may be an important issue.

I've also been discovering the wonders of high res music files on a USB Flash drive; the Oppo will play music in 4 different ways: by disc, USB, E-sata (hard drive), & streamed over a network. There seems to be some thought that an advantage to playing files with a USB port is a reduction in timing jitter due to the lack of a spinning disc (or hard drive).

I haven't done much redbook cd listening due to time constraints. Did a quicky comparison tonight between my old but beloved Esoteric P-10->Illuminati->PS Audio SL3 & the BDP 95. The comparison was a bit flawed as somehow the PS Audio had been powered down (I don't know for how long). Under those circumstances the Oppo was more refined & had a better soundstage (IMO soundstaging is this puppy's #1 strength). I need to do follow up on this when i have some time.

For the price this puppy is amazing; especially if you look at it as a $500 Blu-ray player & a $500 audio player!

At this time I'd say it has 4 main weaknesses, all of which I can live with at this price point:

1. Unforgiving of bad mastering

2. Occasional lock ups & glitches with the internal (infernal??) computer

3. Apparently parts of the HDCD licensing have changed since the 90's; HDCD red book is AT LEAST the uncorrected 3db quieter than regular cd; it feels like considerably more than 3 db.

4. 1/2 second or so pause between tracks when playing computer files. Usually this is no big deal, but it made side 2 of Abbey Road (as an example) pretty unlistenable! This ONLY impacts computer files (wav, flac, etc), NOT CD, SACD or DVD-A.

Oppo tells me this is a known issue that they DON'T plan to fix.

The biggest strength is soundstaging, & it's musicality especially on hi-res material.

Very briefly on video: It has 2 processors: a high end Marvell that only works with "HDMI #1" & some sort of an Oppo processor for the component out I use with my CRT Sony Wega 36" & also is used with "HDMI #2". Even though i am using the low end video processor, the unit still produces the best picture quality I've ever had in my home on both dvd & blu.

In conclusion to this initial review: back in the days of vinyl I used to just sit with the lights out & listen to music, even on the "mid-fi" mass market systems I had growing up & as a young adult. With cd, for years I found myself getting distracted & having to read or something similar while listening as cd just doesn't feel very involving to me (& I'm not an analog is king kind of person, I own several thousand cd's), but with Hi-res music on the Oppo, I once again can just melt into the music & don't feel fidgety.

More to come when I have more time, this is such an amazing unit that I consider this review way too short.

Edit 4/13/12: I really still want to greatly expand this review, but for the moment 3 comments from extended listening:

1. I finally got to do some 16/44 redbook cd comparison between the Oppo & my Esoteric/PS Audio front end. My tentative conclusion: At 1/3 of what I paid for the cd player in the 90's the Oppo has significantly better soundstaging on cd, though I have a slight preference tonally for the old player (on cd only).

2. I have gotten used to the 3d imaging of (quality) high-rez really quickly. I largely now take it for granted except when it's not there: i.e. it's become a bit difficult to listen to regular cd at all on my high end system!

3. My one concern is the semi frequent computer glitches & lockups (mostly on audio only listening, not on video playback) that require a power cycle. While it's not a daily occurrence, it happens often enough that it is a little concerning. Fortunately I bought a 4 year warranty in case this gets worse.

I have to admit, I've been very impressed with this product. I consider myself an "audiophile on a budget" and always try to get the best bang for the buck when I invest in audio components. Also, I suppose I'm a bit of a throwback in that I prefer two channel stereo sound over surround sound and have always preferred the warm expressive sound, imaging, and dynamic range of a good vinyl recording over digital sound. In particular the blueray player I've had connected to my Denon PMA 2000IVR has always sounded terrible playing CDs. Having demoed a few SACD players here and there and been relatively impressed, I decided to give this unit a try based on the reviews. Here are my impressions.

First, the unit is very substantial and generally looks and feels like a very high quality unit, one that would be right at home in an audiophile's collection. Initially, I was a little disappointed once I had it hooked up to my amp and speakers. I tried a collection of my CDs to test out the players performance and one of my limited SACD collection. The sound quality was definitely better than my old player, but only to a minor degree and the bright, somewhat harsh sound I've come to associate with CDs was still present.

As I came to discover, out of the box, this unit is not very well optimized for two channel stereo. I suppose many people will use this unit in a surround sound system, so Oppo seems to pre-configure it for this kind of setup. You have to modify some settings but the user manual and the onscreen guides make it fairly simple (I disabled the surround sound speakers, turned off automatic volume control, changed some stereo processing settings, and also modified the setting that allowed two channel audio to be processed through the "high quality DAC" mentioned in the manual). Most of these settings are under the "audio processing" menu if I recall correctly. If your really interested in exactly what I did, make a comment and I will elaborate on the exact steps.

After the changes where made, I was blown away at the difference. The unit allows CDs to sound remarkably warm and musical. The dynamic range which has always been one of the sore points for CDs in my opinion is wonderful and the sound stage is as alive as anything I've heard on vinyl. I could not be more pleased. CDs sound like SACDs and SACDs (the 4 that I own!) sound sublime. I have a feeling my vinyl collection will be getting a bit dusty as I re-experience my CD library over the next few months.

There were also some added bonuses that I didn't anticipate. Blueray video looks terrific, quite a bit better than my old player. Another bonus is the ability to be able to link via DNLA to my computer to play the digital collection stored there. Unfortunately, this technique doesn't seem to be compatible with the lossless flac files (although the Oppo certainly can if you burn them to disk or have a thumb drive) but I *am* able to convert those to high bit rate mp3s, and the sound quality is completely acceptable, almost indistinguishable from the CDs themselves. DNLA can be a little flaky in general if you've never used it before, but that is no fault of the Oppo. There are plenty of articles on the net about the ins and outs of DNLA that can explain the nuances way better than me. By the wya, you can also get netflix and other streaming channels. Netflix looks pretty good but the initial video buffering can cause the initial for seconds of any video to look a little pixlated. I consider these all bonuses though and the outstanding sound quality is why I rank this buy 5 stars.