I bought my first BD player from Oppo and have had 5 or 6 since. I have their latest 4k/UHD models in both of my viewing rooms. I also have two of their Sonica DACs as well as their HA-1 headphone AMP. Never tried their headphones as I am a Senn/Audeze guy, but they are incredibly popular and have been well received since day 1. A Great company and everything they have come out with was well researched and put together well. Always a few niggles with a new BD player, but it was always fixed via firmware quickly. It really looked like for a while they were really diversifying with excellent products away from the BD market segment. Been a customer of theirs for 15 years or so, and this is really sad news.
Very disappointing. I have a BDP-105 that I’m very happy with but I guess it’s going to have to last a lot longer than I thought. It’s sad to see to the loss of an A/V vendor that seemed to be really committed to providing quality products at reasonable prices.
I don’t want to get into an inappropriate political discussion in this forum, but I too was wondering whether the easy to win trade war with China has anything to do with it.
In any event the standard tech pundit explanation that streaming is supplanting physical media seems lame. Plenty of people are still using and buying physical media and the Oppo players are more streaming capable than most. And the Sonica DAC is immediately unavailable (last I looked), which has little to do with physical media.
I’m wondering if anyone is poised to buy out their business.
I too am a happy Oppo user, using the 205 as Roon end point for the last couple of months. It’s the second digital media platform suddenly summarily obsoleted out from under me, the first being Squeezebox.
Headphone production is stopped too, in addition to video player and DAC.
Another speculation of the cause is that their smartphone business is so excellent that the above businesses are no longer considered worthwhile relatively. (I almost bought an One Plus phone last year, which can be considered to be an Oppo phone.)
I think it makes sense that streaming is taking over. They’re presumably at the point internally where they have to try and design their next generation player. Plough a lot of money into development and testing against what are can only be pretty low sales of very niche hardware. The commercial model is probably looking shaky, so quit while you’re ahead.
Things like specialist DACs probably are going well but the commercial model on them may only make sense if you’re using the same circuits in a whole family of products, the DAC alone may not be a viable business.
I long wondered why did they stay exclusively in the Blue-ray disc players territory (for multichannel, A/V) when their UDP/BDP platforms could have been a fantastic base for a superb Pre/Pro product, without the disc player. Heck - I know from the online communities that many folks use them just for that.
Take the UDP-205 - Remove disc player, add more HDMI inputs, add analog inputs - voila! You get probably one of the best value (and overall) A/V processors/multichannel DACs.
My two Oppo disc players are among my prized possessions. I sold 1000 of my CDs to finance their purchase. Plus, they include a very nice grocery bag with the players.
Believe it or not, I have another 1000 CDs left over, plus SACDs, Blu-ray video and audio, and DVD audio and video, and of course, LPs. Even though most are ripped to files, I can’t give up the physical artifacts that got me started in music and audio.
