I checked and my receiver's remote supports Oppo DVD players. At this price, it seems like a no-brainer to me since the only comparable product I found is SO MUCH more expansive. If it is not that good... well, I guess one of my relative will have a nice DVD-a/SACD player for x-mas!

I saw a post at AVS last month that Oppo will soon be launching a new player, the 983. I will paraphrase what I read: It's apparently a 980 with big improvements. It uses the ABT 102 deinterlacing chip and ABT 1010 scaling engine. The ABT is a cadence chipset so there will be no macroblock enhancement errors (as are occasionally seen with the Faroudja chipset). If coded properly by Oppo, everything will be appropriately de-interlaced and scaled with no aliasing and interlacing errors . Expected to sell for $300-349. Of course, these features only hint at its video performance, but Oppo players, especially the 970, are also highly regarded for their SACD and DVD-A playback.

John

I’ve had an Oppo 981 since December and love it. The video upscaling is fabulous but very dependent on the source. Recent movies like the last three “Star Wars” and the LOTRs movies look beautiful. The superbit edition of “The Fifth Element” is spectacular.

Only two issues so far. If the receiver isn’t powered up before the Oppo there is sometimes a HDMI handshake issue that causes the entire screen to display in shades of pink. Not an issue after I set a delay in my remote.

The other is the macro-blocking. I have only seen this in one movie out of hundreds. It showed up briefly in the opening sequence of “Master and Commander” when the ship moves through the fog bank. However, I don’t think all the Oppo models suffer from this, only the ones with the Faroudja chip hooked up to DLP displays I think.

I’m only just now getting into music with it so I nothing much to say here.

There order service was rapid. I place an internet order at 2:00 PM and it shipped at 4:00 PM the same day. Can’t comment on customer support as I’ve had no problems except those mentioned above.

What is macro blocking?

Here’s an example:

Example

Not sure of the technical details but as I understand it has to do with the lack of information available to reconstruct the original image due to lack of information in the original source, lossy compression and/or insufficient bandwidth to carry the information. The macroblock is a 16x16 pixel block used in video compression to carry the image information. When there is insufficient information to construct the detailed image it can show up as one block of color rather than individual pixels.

In the case of “Master and Commander” I mentioned on my system it caused the fog bank to appear as large blocks of distinct shades of grey moving across the screen rather than a gradual gradation of color.

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?