buy-oppobdp-80The OPPO BDP-80 is the ONLY universal player in the world that includes Blu-Ray, and SACD on the same platform, and costs only $289.00! That is phenomenal.

After several weeks listening to the unit, hooked into my system via both HDMI and optical digital, I have these comments.

The CD bitstream, acquired via optical digital, is at least as good as my Sony was. The sound is clean, pure, and accurate. SACD, acquired as a discrete multichannel output, is excellent. I can finally hear the improvement that DSD provides; a more open high end, more “air” around string instruments in the orchestra, more ambiance in jazz recordings. I’ve been missing something, and this is the answer for serious home reproduction of fine music.

The pleasant surprise – MP3′s via the USB port! I am shocked that better quality MP3 input (320 kbps) sound almost as good as CD’s. And it is trivial to move files onto a thumb drive, and play them on the player. I am shocked at how often I use this little gem of a feature.

Video is vastly improved. All of the up-converted signals from traditional DVDs are sharp, far better than the lo-fi players I used to use. The ability to get clean Dolby Digital signal over HDMI is a huge improvement, as my receiver is not capable of decoding the new Blu-ray formats.

Here’s my bottom line:

The only unit that can do all this, under a thousand dollars, is the larger OPPO! While I concede that the audio output of the larger OPPO is better than this unit,(heck, Lexicon takes the BDP-83, changes out a few capacitors, wraps a better box on it, and charges $3500!) this still delivers SACD, good CD, and MP3 in a single package, for less than $300.00.

And as someone who takes pride in getting a lot of audio bang for my buck… this unit delivers exactly what I want. I can put any media format in my house into one player, and get high quality audio and video, for a very nice price.

By R. Fleischer (Skokie, IL USA)