Official OPPO BDP-95 Owner's Thread - Page 323

Thanks I appreciate it!

Can the 95 read a disc containing non-SACD DSD files like ones described here? BTW Bill M., I didn't see the topic discussed in your otherwise excellent BDP-93 FAQ (which brings me to wonder when you're going to start an Unofficial OPPO BDP-103 Frequently Asked Questions page?).

^ Please try to keep up!



--Bob

I have color space set to - YCBCr 4:4:4 and deep color set to off. Is that right you think?

display options - everything is off except screen saver - OSD & subtitle shift are "0"


1080p24 output - Auto
DVD 24p Conversion - off

No.

That's a good starting point, and may even be the "best" settings choices for your display.

The reason to choose between the Color Space choices and the Deep Color choices may have more to do with working around peculiarities of your display (i.e, bugs) than anything else.

Once you have time to consider tweaking for best picture you should spend some quality time with a calibration disc like Spears & Munsil and double check that everything is set up correctly. Keep in mind that the Factory Default (0) values for Setup > Video Setup > Picture Adjustment put out reference level signals. So ideally you should leave the player set that way and make any adjustments that are needed using your display's controls.

Now, it SHOULD be the case that the SAME settings in the Display will work regardless of which Color Space / Deep Color choices you make in the player. But you need to check it, as some displays have been known to react differently to different video input data formats (for no good reason). You need to find out whether or not that's true for your display. If you CAN'T get the display properly adjusted for a given video format from the OPPO then just discard that format from consideration.

That will leave you with a set of formats that you know all work with your display. Now choosing which of those to actually settle on can be tricky. Calibration discs are not really designed to aid in that choice. You could view a lot of different content and cycle through the choices to see whether you spot any differences, but that's pretty time consuming.

One way I've found useful is to focus on a particularly revealing check scene in "Ratatouille", Blu-ray, Chapter 10. Do a Search in the 93 thread for a post by me on Ratatouille for details. Again this is for aid in trying to select from among the set of Color Space / Deep Color choices you've already decide all work with your display -- possibly with some special adjustment need in your display for some of them.
--Bob

Oppo 95 freezes

Hello I have a Oppo 95 14 months old, it is playing cd very well, but starts freezing the pictures when playing BD. What is the Problem??

Best Regards from DK

This sounds like a classic example of disc reading problems.

If that is happening on just a few discs then those discs may be dirty or scratched. Check and carefully clean the playing surface.

If it is just one disc, and the playing surface looks clean, then the disc may have a manufacturing flaw. Particularly for Blu-ray discs, it is possible to have such flaws which aren't visible by eye. Try to exchange the disc.

If it is happening on most Blu-ray discs, then the odds are you have picked up some dust or some oily film on your laser lens. This can happen anywhere, but is more likely to happen if the player is set up where smoking, cooking, fireplaces, or scented candles are found.

The easy fix is to clean the lens. OPPO can do that for you as a for-charge service (call them for details -- they might even do it for free if you are lucky) or you can do it yourself. There are cleaning discs of various types, but the BEST way is to remove the chassis top, remove the protective plate on top of the loader and gently swab the lens clean with a Q-tip barely moistened with alcohol. Reassemble and you should be good to go.
--Bob

Thanks a lot Bob. By the Way is Maxell cleaner ( with air) a possibility?

I'm not familiar with that one, but if you are referring to the one that sets up air turbulence as it spins (without making physical contact with the lens), that will likely work for dust but not for oil film. But a design like that is the "safest" of the cleaning disc options.

Check hard surfaces near the player -- glass or porcelain for example -- and see if they leave a streak if you swipe your finger. If so, then you've got something putting oily particulates in the air.
--Bob

Thanks Bob

I doubt adding any preamp will improve the sound over the direct connection, but it can add flexibility if you need more sources. I use 7.1 RCA and stereo XLR analog inputs to a Cary Cinema 11a set to bypass mode. I prefer the amps to be near the speakers, and the balanced outputs from the Cary facilitate longer runs from processor to amps.

db

i just picked up a couple albums they are HDCD's. I turned HDCD decoding to on. I can play the disc fine but there isn't any indexing, track info etc displayed. Computer software shows it fine though when i tested it.

Bob,

Thanks for post 9655 re DSD, it is a helpful explanation. I realize that although I perceive the balanced analog stereo output to my Cary Cinema 11a to be a bit superior to analog 7.1 (actually 5.1), I haven't been switching to the stereo layer of those SACDs that have both. I'll try that today. I found an additional benefit of analog, at least with the Cinema 11a, is the elimination of pops and clicks when changing status, but perhaps that's just a problem with the Cary implementation of HDMI. My original reason for going to analog was to activate my pair of Velodyne HGS-15s when playing SACDs -- the Cary treats 88.2 kHz as DSD, even LPCM, but I've since installed a pair of KEF R107/2s with their KUBE and no longer need the subs for music, even low pedal notes of a pipe organ.

db

Contact the people you bought the mod from. They are still around, aren't they?

If you switch layers on your SACD's you're still comparing apples and oranges because you are listening to 2 different mixes. The stereo layer is not a mix-down of the surround layer. Sometimes the differences are small and other times not.

re: Rebecca Pidgeon "The Raven" SACD Multi-channel

This shows up as 5.0 Channels on the BDP-95 - but I get no signal out of the centre channel or the sub.

Does anyone else have any experience with this disc?

Have I found a bug with the 95 or with the shiny disc - or my logic?

If you are using DSD playback there is no Crossover processing. And since this disc has no LFE content (the .0 in 5.0) the Sub will have nothing to play.

If it has Center content, then that will play if you have the Center speaker turned on. If you are using a "phantom Center" -- no Center speaker, and expecting Center content to be down-mixed into LF/RF, that too can't work during DSD playback. Try SACD Output PCM instead.
--Bob

Thanks Bob.

I am getting sub content now and I think it was like you said, that I had it set to DSD instead of PCM.

But still no center channel.

The center works just fine but this disc is just not producing any output on that channel.

I am currently running the whole disc with only the center turned on (active speakers) to see if maybe the disc is recorded with almost no (but still some!) center channel information.

all my speakers are set to small, sub is on with crossover set to 60 Hz.

^ Swap the Center and, say, Left Front Analog output cables at the back of the 95 and see if the loss of audio moves to your Left Front speaker. If it stays in your Center speaker then you know the problem is external to the player.

I'm not familiar with this disc so I don't know whether it is supposed to have Center content. Some multi-channel music recordings minimize Center content so as to widen the sound stage.
--Bob

There is no spec for anything but 5.1 and 5.0 on SACD multichannel. So a 3, 4 or 5 ch will still be indicated as "5.0". The unused channels are just empty. There are quite a few examples of discs with empty channels. Analog Productions recent releases of 3-ch remasters are one example. Many classical releases will also have no center and/or no LFE.

There are also examples of former Quad recordings that have been released in 4-ch in the 5.0 wrapper.

I've tried to contact Chesky (i'm getting a "mailbox quota full" error right now) - it seems likely that it was made with only 4 channels on purpose.

There are also SACD that use Quadrophonic masters. These only had front and back left and right and no center channel or LFE channel. I think Chesky may have also used the Ambisonic system at one time for some recordings. Who knows how that would be mixed for surround.

I own only a very small number of SACD's, as my preference is for DVD Audio (and might now be changing to Blu-ray Audio, as some companies, including Naxos, are begining to produce 88.2k and 96k material on blul-ray audio-only discs), but all of my (small number of) SACD discs have either a very muted, or no, centre channel.

I would be interested to hear what a tech-savvy person would have to say about the value of buying modern remasters of material recorded prior to the advent of technology which enabled hi-def recording, mixing, mastering and playback. You cannot get more fidelity out of an old master by remastering with 96k equipment. The most you could do is restore these original older recordings to their original (less than hi-def) best.

Mark Waldrep (of AIX Records) has frequently "gone to war" in print over "fake" DVD-A recordings which are "fake" because they offer no better sound quality than the originally produced CDs because they were not recorded at hi-def in the first place:
http://www.aixrecords.com/articles/article_2.html
http://www.aixrecords.com/articles/archive_article_5_aix.html

I have probably really stirred the hornets nest now (and I don't even have a dragon tattoo!).

Would be interested to learn when hi-def capable equipment emerged, and first started being used, if any audio engineering historian out there knows??

Just for the record, for my own purposes I use the term hi-def for audio as anything that was originally recorded, mastered and produced at the consumer stage with 24-bit 88.2k sampling rate as a minimum start (or the DSD version, which as I understand is only 1-bit, but at a sampling rate in the mhz rather than khz range.

Over to you guys!!

(later edit): when I said "about the value of buying modern remasters of material recorded prior to the advent of technology which enabled hi-def recording, mixing, mastering and playback" I was not suggesting that earlier recorded material was not worth chasing - a world without Satchmo etc would be a sad world. But what I was referring to was an expectation that putting older recordings into a hi-def package would give you real hi-def where there was none to begin with.
Edited by madaudio - 10/3/12 at 6:59pm

In the case of material recorded on analog tape, it is possible that remastering in 88.2 or 96k could lead to better sound quality if the original master tapes were properly recorded and have been maintained in good shape. For this reason, I think blanket statements that hi-def remasters are essentially a fraud paints with too broad a brush. It is true that remastering early digital recordings at a higher bit rate won't improve things but many recordings that have been re-issued in hi-def come from analog sources where improvements are possible (though hardly guaranteed).

Modern re-mastering of old analogue recordings can produce a better consumer item than originally produced using early remastering technology, but the most you might do is get it to cd quality, not hi-def. So such items should be offered on cd discs, instead of offering them on DVD-A as if they are the equivalent of recently recorded genuine hi-res sound.

Read this:
http://www.aixrecords.com/articles/article_2.html
(added after original post) and this:
http://www.aixrecords.com/articles/article_8_stones.html

Masters of any kind produced with equipment of 30-50 yrs ago (1980's or earlier) cannot match the hi-res recordings now possible with modern digital sampling equipment. I have early AAD cd's produced in the early 1980s (and I am talking respected-brand recording companies with respected artists) and you can tell the difference between them and a modern DDD cd or even a standard "lossy" Dolby digital current day recording, let alone a modern SACD or DVD-A hi-def recording.

Again, I'm not denigrating what was achieved back then, nor the value (to music lovers who still appreciate the musicianship and achieve[ments of bygone artists/bands/orchestras whatever. I'm just saying that you cannot get out of an old recording (and, with the technology gains we have seen, even 25-30 yrs is "old") what was not possible to get into it.

A remaster, at best, can only restore to original quality, (that's just straight logic) and if original quality was not hi-res (which was not possible 30+ yrs ago) then you cannot have a 30+ yrs old recording "restored" to high-res.

If you prefer the particular sound of vinyl, or analogue tapes from those yrs in pref to modern digital sound, fine,that's personal pref, and cannot be argued over (at least not sensibly) but let's not be taken in by companies offering DVD-As of 60s, 70s or even early 80s recordings as if these recordings have been magically turned into hi-def recordings: doesn't happen.
Edited by madaudio - 10/4/12 at 10:22am

I would disagree with this. While modern digital provides a greater noise floor and dynamic range, many of the best analogue professional tape machines had a much greater frequency range than the 5-22khz used for CDs, going well beyond 20k. CDs are not able to capture this but hi-def mastering can. I won't get into the arguments as to whether you can hear above 20k but there is a good deal of evidence that material with a range beyond 20k sounds different from an ambience standpoint, even for those with normal hearing, and that this contributes to the overall sound quality of what we hear. For many recordings of pop music and jazz the advantage of greater dynamic range for digital recording is moot because these musical forms rarely have dynamic range of more than 30-40 db, well within the range of analog tape.

re post by JazzGuyy Post 9689

Did you read the two (and other) articles I referenced?

On analogue tapes:

http://www.aixrecords.com/articles/article_2.html

And dressing up old albums in "Hi def":
http://www.aixrecords.com/articles/article_18_hdcd_really.html

And many others:
http://www.aixrecords.com/articles.html

Many of which reference other "experts" to support his articles. He does seem to know (as a sound engineer with personal experience in the field, what he is talking about. I'll confess, I am no techie, and have to rely on other "experts" claims (as is true for most of us) but my own sense of logic inclines me to accept his statements (which he backs up with evidence).
Plus the quality of AIX DVD-As that I have bought cetainly delivers what he preaches.