Talk about bummed out. I have both a 95 used exclusively for music and a 203 for movies. I was contemplating picking up a 205 and selling the 95. Not sure what to do now. I always valued oppo for the ability to be a fantastic music player. The 95 stereo analog outs feeding my headphone amp and Sennheisers is fantastic. The 203 has made my DVD library viable again doing a fantastic job job upscaling DVDs to 4k, reminding me of the upconversion capability of the anchor bay processing in my old long gone 83.
I know some say pick one up, it will last forever. But things do break, and once they quit servicing players, you are stuck with a 1299 box of electronic parts. I know they say they'll continue to honor warranties and service players and provide FW updates, but the reality is once the last player is sold and the last warranty period is over, they'll quietly close shop. If they do keep the doors open beyond that, any true talent the company has will have long bolted for greener pastures, hopefully starting their own company. I suspect that going forward we'll have disc compatibility fw updates and that's about it.
I don't mind a plastic 4k blu ray player for 200 bucks, but I demand a good music player and my preferred format is disc, sacd, dvd-a, and cd. I'll continue to baby my 95 which plays sacd, DVD-a and ripped CDs via usb. Pick up a 205? Don't know, but I'll now pay more attention to what's available in a CD/SACD players for my next music player, maybe a marantz.
I know some will say they'll be worth a lot. Maybe initially there will be some gouging, but one of the value propositions of Oppo was fast, low cost, and flat rate servicing which made buying a used player, even years old a good risk/value proposition. Not now.
What to do.