Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Thoughts on OPPO DV-981HD

Great explanation. Thank you.

I just received my 980 and it works great. Very happy although the DSD via HDMI was a no go for me as my receiver will only do SACD DSD via I-Link. Other than that great so far.

Another contented 980 owner here. It replaced the 971, and is definitely a step up.

It is on the way! I ordered it (the 980) and it will be slowly making its way home during the next few days.

Now I guess I better go shopping for a few SACDs this weekend since Amazon seems to be in no hurry to send me the big order I placed two weeks ago for about 15 SACDs.

I will keep you posted... in this new UI that will take time to get use to!

Thank you all for your replies.

Got it! It is currently playing as I speak. Having all these HDMI to talk together seems to be a hurdle for a while (TV is 1.0/1.1 [not sure which one], Receiver is 1.3 and player is 1.2a). Hook was easy, but getting the player to send multi-channel 96Khz took a few restarts of all the chain (was stuck at 48Khz for a while).

Can't get the menu to send SACD as DSD to be enabled, though. Possibly due to the fact that receiver is both a "termination" of the HDMI connection (audio) and a pass-through (video). I don't know enough about the whole protocol to see if there can be a problem with version negociation or not... Anyway, it is not that bad. The player seems quite adequate to decode the stream properly. It is just that Onkyo's processing is completely available with it is decoding DSD. Again, not really a big deal.

It is very nice (and you can hear it with a cello playing) that the bass management is now done by the receiver instead of my LG DVD player. High-bass are much smoother. I am pretty sure it is not an illusion, but, you know... you never know!

In any case, there was 2 DVD-Audio that were causing problem to the LG (Meridian encoding) and they are playing beautifully on the Oppo.

All in all, so far it is a great buy (200$ tax and shipping included). I will try later some up-convertion with various material (Seinfeld, House, Stargate Atlantis) to see if it is better or par with my LG (I don't really care since it is only for the HDMI audio for combo DVD-a/SACD that I bought it).

Nice look, nice details in the packaging (including a six-foot long not-too-cheap HDMI cable!). Well... maybe more later...

Can't believe this!

It was just that I had a DVD-Audio in the player... All SACD options were grayed out! Now it is setup properly.

Eric,

Are you listening to SACD via HDMI or the analog outputs?