Oppo Obituary

After almost exactly 4.5 years, my Oppo BDP-105D (a monumental audiophile Blu-ray player) has died a heat death. The player would shut off spontaneously after about two hours of operation, then when turned back on would shut off again after only 15 minutes or so, unless it got enough time to cool off. Disappointing for such an expensive device, but quite possibly the failure point was in the custom modification to defeat region checking.

While looking for a replacement, I discovered that Oppo had already stopped production of its entire product lineup in April 2018. The exact reasons are unclear but Oppo Digital is sibling to a much bigger smartphone company, so most likely its products just didn’t bring the sales volume expected by their parent holding.

At any rate, I had already replaced the analogue amplifier mentioned in the original Oppo review with a high-end Yamaha receiver, capable of all the digital sound processing I previously got through the player. The Yamaha has no equivalent to Oppo’s Darbee visual processing but that was just nice, not essential.

Since the player’s only responsibility now is shoveling bits in the general direction of the Yamaha receiver, I didn’t bother with another high end model and just got the Panasonic DP-UB824EG, a modern and solid though unspectacular device. Works just fine for reading disks, and the receiver does the rest. RIP Oppo.

(Why this Panasonic? Because I still want region-free DVD playback for my stack of American DVDs, and the German retailer HiFi-Regler happened to offer that modification for that model, even free on purchase of a new player.)

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