Recently I indulged in an audio/video upgrade of my living room sound system, replacing two boxes—an excellent Rotel CD player and a piddling Sony Blu-Ray—with a spanking-new Oppo BDP-105, a crown jewel amongst universal disc players. The BDP-105 can play just about anything that’s on a shiny disc with laser-etched pits: CDs, SACDs, DVDs, DVD-A, Blu-Ray, Blu-Ray Audio, and so forth. Furthermore, it can serve as a digital hub, given its audiophile-grade digital-to-analog conversion stage and enough inputs and outputs to serve just about anybody for anything.
On top of that, it’s a heavy, beautifully-made machine, designed with the discriminating consumer in mind, although without one of those surrealistic price tags that so often accompany high-end audio products. At its current retail price it’s a downright steal.
I got it mostly to play SACD discs; my Sony Blu-Ray deck could play them, but with only mediocre sound thanks to ho-hum digital-to-analog circuitry. Because SACDs are saddled with built-in copy protection, you can’t output the digital stream from an SACD for processing elsewhere, dang nab it. SACDs limit you to the player’s onboard analog audio processing ability, whereas with CDs you can send the player’s digital output to a separate DAC.
My outboard DAC is a Bryston BDA-1, a superb piece of gear that produces exquisite sound from whatever digital source you happen to feed it—the output from a computer, CD player, whatever. I always play CDs by using the CD player solely as a transport and sending its data stream to the Bryston. (Almost every CD player worth its salt has a digital output, by the way, typically either an RCA-style coax connector or a Toslink optical.)
When I connected the Oppo BDP-105 to my system, I kept the same setup for playing CDs—i.e., using the Oppo as a transport only and sending the data itself to the Bryston for processing. Therefore, a CD played on either the Oppo or my Rotel CD player should have sounded identical, given that the Bryston was actually processing the digital data.
To my surprise, playing the CD on the Oppo resulted in a dramatic improvement in sound; more open, clearer, greater soundstage, enhanced presence, the works. Thereby hangs that oft-repeated but nonetheless audiophile catchphrase: everything matters. You wouldn’t think that the transport would make such a difference. After all, the transport’s job is to extract the digital data off those laser-etched pits on the compact disc and send those 1s and 0s off to the (onboard or outboard) digital-to-analog converter. One transport should be pretty much like the other. But that’s not the way it is.
A bit of thinking through the matter, followed by some rummaging through the Internet, illuminated the cause for the difference. A transport doesn’t just extract the data, after all: it also performs any error-correction that might be necessary, and it is also responsible for applying any filters that are necessary to avoid problems resulting from sampling errors and the like. Thus transports aren’t all alike. While my Rotel CD player is an excellent model in every way, it just doesn’t have as posh a transport and digital-extraction mechanism as the Oppo, which so supercharges my Bryston digital-to-analog converter and eggs it on to entirely new heights of sonic excellence.
So everything matters. Funny how audiophilia has the occasional lesson to offer, even if for the most part high-end audio is only a harmless—albeit expensive—hobby, mostly for guys of a certain age who have progressively shed those dangerous or health-risky or downright foolish pursuits of our younger days. But we take our guidance where we can get it. Everything matters.