[bubba966]

So I took the Bolder modded OPPO to Al Garay's house yesterday.

He didn't have his Toshiba calibrated yet, so I did that.

Comparing the SB copy of The Fifth Element on his 34" Toshiba with the stock & modded OPPO showed the stock OPPO to be washed out, lacking detail, & to have more video noise than the modded OPPO.

The modded OPPO clearly had a much better picture. It only took a couple of seconds to see the better blacks on the modded player. The better color saturation on the modded player. Less video noise on the modded player. And much better picture detail on the modded player.

We didn't do as many video test as I would've liked because his audio system needed calibrating as well. So I laser aligned his mains & center and we set out to level match his speakers.

Working with his Sony ES digital receiver was a nightmare. After nearly an hour we got his speakers level matched. Man do I hate Sony's UI...

And shortly after we got things level matched (didn't even get to setting the distances yet) the Sony decided it's time was up and croaked on us.

So we never even got to do any audio comparisons with the stock &  modded player as the rest of the day was spent trying to figure out if the Sony was going to run again (it didn't). After it was determined that the Sony was in need of service it was decided that it was going back and being replaced with something else that was easier to use and wouldn't croak within a month.

Took the Sony back to the store and got them to be very nice about price matching a Pioneer Elite VSX-56TXi. Had just enough time to get it back to Al's & get it connected & quick calibrated. Love the Advanced MCACC on the Pioneer's. Fully auto-calibrated in 5 or so mintues...

Anyway, I found the $500 Basic OPPO mod w/Bybee Purifier that Wayne offers to be more than worth it for the improvement it brings to the picture & the digital output. If you're watching movies with your OPPO (and that's the whole reason you own one, right?) I highly reccomend the Basic mod w/Bybee. Well worth the $.

I haven't had time with the analog audio end of it yet to form an opinion. Hoping to do that either tomorrow or Sunday.

[Al Garay]

It seems like my system is always under construction when Brian comes over. I had not adusted the monitor settings after I applied the firmware upgrade for the Oppo. I had the contrast on way too high. So, I'm grateful to have Brian's help. Never would I have anticipated my one month old Sony STR-DA5000ES suffering a meltdown. In any case, we watched long enough to do a comparison of my stock Oppo with Wayne's fully-modded Oppo. We used a glass toslink cable to connect the DVDs to the Sony's optical input.  Unfortunately, we didn't have a chance to try out the digital coax and the analog connections.

My focus tends to be on the audio side of things so my eyes are not as trained to pick out the subtle details like Brian can. I can assess that Wayne's modded Oppo is superior. The picture has less noise, everything has a better focus, sharpness. The difference is not great as I would still say that the standard picture is quite good. With the mods, I agree with the claim that the picture is closer to high-def. If I didn't have to worry about pre-amp, receiver (not sure I'm going to keep the Pioneer Elite 56TXi, sound is not as clear, transperant, engaging as the Sony's or Arcam AVR300 that I've heard) and finishing my surround speakers, I would be ordering the Oppo mods.  Excellent job Wayne.

And now you went and modded the SlimDevices Squeezebox... Curse you Wayne!!!  I should try that against my standard model. I've talked several of the locals into buying them. I would start with the Oppo mod since we used that a lot more.

Many thanks again to Wayne and Brian for the pleasure of auditioning your product.

Al

[Wayne1]

I am glad that you and Brian were able to hook up. I am also glad that you noticed improvements with the Modded OPPO.

Brian is going to try to hook-up with Kris Deering of Secrets of
Home Theater and High Fidelity. Hopefully Kris will have some time to run some test on the OPPO so we can have some hard data for the spec sheet readers

When that is doen the OPPO will head down to California to Mike at Surf Remote Control. He is doing a review of the OPPO and it would be cool to have the modded one to compare it to.

The modded SB2 may be a bigger improvement in audio reproduction than the OPPO is in Video.  I can say I do miss my OPPO

[MikeSRC]

Thanks for posting all the info guys.  The comments about the difference with the SB version of 5th Element are particularly interesting to me, since I know that disc like the back of my hand.  I'm anxious to see what kind of difference I see with my 720p DLP projector (which has been calibrated with OpticOne probe and software, in conjunction with Avia Pro).

I'm also looking forward to checking out the audio improvements as I feel that's where the Oppo could use the most help (as you would expect from a $200 player).

[Adz523]

So, is there an update?  Where is that modded OPPO these days?

[Wayne1]

The Oppo is still in Seattle.

I believe Bubba is still trying to hook up with Kris Deering.

[kbuzz3]

curious to see if there are any other comments on the mods, particularly on the video side.  Does this player have an hdmi in addition to the dvi?

[Wayne1]

The OPPO DVD player does not have HDMI out.

You can ask OPPO for a cable that will plug into HDMI.

I sent the player to Bubba with a 3 meter DVI to DVI cable.

Bubba was supposed to check out the analog audio output last week.

He was then going to send to player to Kris Deering to check out.

After that the player is going to California for MikeSRC to evaluate.

From there, hopefully it will come back to Colorado.

I am not sure about any other tour stops. The OPPO has been gone for about a month now with very little comments.

[Wayne1]

I just heard from Bubba. He has had some family problems that kept him rather busy.

He is shipping the modded OPPO to Kris Deering this week. Then it will go on to MikeSRC.

I have received another Oppo for mods, so hopefully there might be some more comments about the modded player.

[kbuzz3]

Well i am curious to see if it will best by modded phillips 963 as a transport.

Of course the video will also be fun to compare....

[bubba966]

I'd like to apologize to Wayne and any others that were waiting to hear the outcome of my demo'ing the OPPO. Many things didn't go as planned and some demos that I'd like to have done didn't get done, and things took a lot longer than I wanted them to.

Let me start off by saying this. If my Loewe Aventos had a DVI or HDMI input I'd be in the process of selling my Pioneer DV-AX10 and I'd buy an OPPO & have Wayne run the video/digital mod w/Bybee on it. For point of reference the AX10 was sold for $6,000 while it was in production. And the little $200 OPPO with $500 worth of mods doesn't get run over by the AX10. In fact it will outperform it in the video realm on DVI or HDMI and comes damn close to the AX10 on the audio transport side of things.

Unfortunately I don't have any digital video input on my display, so I'm sticking with my current DVDP.

So now for a bit better explaination.

I ran the OPPO on component video using a Monster M1000 component cable, a Bolder Cables cryo'd digital coax w/Silver WBT NextGen's, Bolder Cables Summit IC's on the 6 channel analog outs, and a Bolder Cables Nitro PC w/Furutech Rhodium plated plugs.

I ran the Pioneer DV-AX10 on component video using a Bolder Cables cryo'd component video cable with BNC's on the sending end & Silver WBT NextGen's on the other end, Bolder Cables cryo'd Napalm Ultra digital coax, stock PC, & Bolder Cables Summit IC's on the 6 channel analog outs.


First off was the Bolder modded OPPO. Ran my standard Fifth Element demo. The PQ wasn't so bad really. It wasn't close to the PQ I'd seen on prior demos when it was using the DVI out. Because that was quite amazing on DVI. But it was rather good on the Component video outs. It had more video noise than my AX10 does. But it wasn't totally blown away by the AX10.

The audio output of the Bolder modded OPPO on the digital out is very good. Much better than I'd thought possible from such a little machine. In my experience you'd have to spend over a few grand on a stock DVD player before you mildly outperform the digital out of the Bolder modded OPPO.

When I finally got the 6 channel outputs hooked up I popped in Wayne's DVD-A copy of Sinatra at the Sands. I'd not ever heard a DVD-A disc before. And man was I impressed. It was sounding almost as good as Redbook sounds on my AX10 (and that sounds pretty damn good), maybe as good as the AX10. No wonder why Babcock really likes DVD-A discs 'cause they sound really, really nice...

Now onto the Pioneer DV-AX10. Hooked up the 6 channel outputs (first time I'd had any of the analog outs connected) and threw the Sinatra DVD-A in. Now I know why it's been said that the AX10 was won of the best DVD-A machines ever built. The AX10 outputs a cleaner signal on the 6 channel outs than the modded OPPO does. The OPPO doesn't get spanked though. It's still rather good. But it doesn't quite make it to the level of the Pioneer DV-AX10. Not surprising since the AX10 was built by Pioneer to really show off what DVD-A can sound like. And I recall hearing that it took a $20K player to outdo the Pioneer on DVD-A. So the modded OPPO coming close to the AX10 on DVD-A is most impressive in my book.

I'd get into things better if I wasn't almost asleep at the keyboard right now and if I could write better. So if anyone wants any more clarification on things just ask and I'll try to answer as best as I possible can at a later time.

Oh, and before I call it a night I'd like to add that the Bolder modded OPPO is very easily better at PAL>NTSC conversion than my Tenlabs TR-21 Video Standards Transcoder. And that's an $800 standalone video standards converter. You can get the whole OPPO w/Bolder Cables video/digital/Bybee mods for under just the price of my video converter!