Inter_Voice said:
the record spot said:
There aren't any universal players at the £1k price I think, so you might try and seek out a used Denon DCD3930, which was around £900 about five years ago, the aforementioned Arcam, or you could get a Cambridge 751BD which is the current all formats player at £800. The Denon you should get for about £300 or so, try Ebay and Gumtree and the occasional dealer who can offer an ex-dem one lying round in a store room somewhere. I think Jimmy Hughes (another hifi reviewer) used one of these for his own system at one time. Performance was, from memory, excellent by all accounts. I'd hit the patient button and wait for one of those to come round. Equally, if you love the Oppo, stick with it.
The DCD3930 are outdated product and I don't think its performance is better than my existing OPPO 83NU edition. The DAC chipset Denon used are not as new. Cambridge 751BD is very similar to OPPO 95EU and I also think its performance is very closed to my 83NU or may be just a little bid better in some areas (with question mark). The major draw back of using an universal player for CD playback is due to its relatively higher jitter noise. Actually I can consider making modifications to OPPO's mater clock but it will cost around £300. May be using a DAC can overcome this shortcomings and a more direct approach. The only problem is how to identify a decent DAC which is better than my OPPO?
Obviously, being about five years old, the 3930 is out of date in terms of product line, but not necessarily performance. Whether it's better or worse than the Oppo is up to you to hear, if you ever do hear one. That Jimmy Hughes used one rather says the jitter issue is non-existant in terms of audible detraction (I don't think it's the problem people claim it to be - I used a Sony BDP-S370 a few times and it's absolutely fine for CD playback and that's a basic player, so your Oppo will be just as good if not better).
For £1k, as stated, you can either go for a standalone CD player, but there are few with SACD as you know, or you can stick with what you have. I wouldn't lose any sleep over jitter and if you want to mod the Oppo, well...
As for DACs, none will permit direct play of SACD (licensing issues I think and I'm not sure about the HDCD or DVD-A elements either), but Emotiva's XDA-1 at £349 is meant to be brilliant. You can spend more, but Item Audio let you try the thing at home for two or three weeks and all you pay is shipping, so you can try and buy, or return for a refund with little cost impact.
And as for identifying, rather like the jitter issue, blind testing is the way to go.