Hi,
This has been addressed in bits and pieces in other threads, but I wanted to get some direct advice in on place.

I am preparing to purchase one of the Oppo players, either the 980H or 981HD. My intention is to replace both an old DVD player and a failing high-end SACD player. My ears are fairly good, so I don't want something that sounds terrible, though it doesn't need to match the sound of my old player (that would be very difficult at this price point, I think).

My major restriction is that my older Plasma screen has DVI with no HDCP.

That means I have one of two choices. I can:
1. Buy the 981 and patch it to remove the HDCP. That would permit me to feed the signal as 720p directly into the DVI input (the screen is only 1024x768).
or,
2. Buy the 980 with an HDFury adapter to feed into the RGB input of the plasma. That would allow me to get the better sound quality of the 980 and also permit me to run other HDCP protected signals into the screen in the future. In this case, I am sacrificing image quality (based on the loss of the Faruja chip and the conversion in the HDFury) in favor of sound quality.

The problem is that I don't know how bad the sound is on the 981 (compared to the 980) and I don't know how bad the image of the 980 through the HDFury will be compared to the 981. As a result, it is hard to make a decision.

Any ideas or suggestions? Does anyone have any experience using the 980 through the HDFury?

Thanks,
Dan