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In Reply to: RE: Kind of hard to do posted by old Bob on November 5, 2017 at 07:30:23:
> > i thought i was buying a HIGH END CD player the OPPO, for ?? $1500.?? < <
Yes, for any "normal" person, $1500 *is* very high-end for a disc player!
That was the entire purpose for the Chinese government to help found and subsidize Oppo. They were fed up with the rich Chinese people sending their money to the US to purchase Apple products, and were determined to create a 100 percent Chinese-made product that would have the prestige to lure the entire world to buy - including the rich Chinese who used to look down on Chinese products as "cheap copies".
The Chinese are incredible at making cheap fake copies of just about anything, from watches (eg, Rolex) to transistors (eg, Toshiba of Japan). The problem is that there is no free lunch. A cheap copy is cheap because it isn't worth what the real thing is.
Oppo started by making high-value DVD players. When Blu-ray displaced DVD for the "high-end" market, Oppo was the first company to come out with a BD player that was affordable and also played all audio dixc formats (CD, SACD, and DVD-Audio) - $500 for the BDP-83. At that time, the only other player in the world that would do the same was a Denon that sold for many thousands of more dollars.
The Oppo was such a good value that one US "high-end" manufacturer (Lexicon - sister company to Mark Levinson and both owned by Harman International - which was just sold this year to Korean giant Samsung) literally took the entire Oppo BDP-83, including the chassis and put it inside a fancy aluminum chassis with a thick faceplate and sold it for $3500 - 7x the price of the exact same player without the glitz and "brand name".
The video industry has deliberately created huge barriers to keep small, innovative companies out of the game. To be officially licensed to make DVD players costs $150,000 for up-front licensing, plus $50,000 in annual renewals, plus roughly 5% of wholesale cost of the final product. While that works for the 7 giant companies that jointly own all of the DVD patents, it is literally an impossible barrier for small, innovative high-end manufacturers. Blu-ray is even worse than that.
For a few years, there were a few companies like Theta and Ayre that made "pirate" DVD players by purchasing fully finished, fully-licensed DVD players from Pioneer and "modifying" them to one degree or another. Theta changed several things for improved performance, but Ayre is the only company that literally re-built the player from the ground up, using just the key components required to make it work - the transport mechanism, the main decoding board that controlled the transport and decoded and separated the digital audio and video data, and the front panel display and microprocessor to control the display and respond to the front panel buttons. (Ayre removed those two parts and remounted them onto a custom-designed PCB - Printed Circuit Board).
Ayre built everything else from the ground up, including the video converters and circuitry, the audio converters and circuitry, the power supplies, the critical clocks required for high-performance digital, the chassis, and everything. The problem with this approach is that the Japanese companies had teams of 30 to 40 engineers working to continuously develop "new and improved" (and always less expensive, to attract more customers) products every single year - just like the automobile industry - a planned obsolescence designed to have people buy newer "better" ones every couple of years.
The small, innovative companies cannot keep pace with that product cycle. They need to have a product lifetime of at least two or three years, if not five or ten years. There simply aren't enough talented, inspired engineers in the world to meet that schedule, and even if there were, there isn't enough customer demand to pay that much extra for the degree of improvement involved - the so-called "law of diminishing returns".
When Oppo made their BDP-83 Blu-ray player, it was a cheap copy of the superb technology the Japanese giants had created. Typically a copy is never as good as the original, as the copier does not understand *why* things were done in a certain way. And that is what happened with Oppo. When Ayre chose to "pirate" the Oppo, we mistakenly thought it would be as straight-forward as working with the superbly-engineered Japanese products.
It was not. There were no service manuals available. There were many, many design details that made zero sense from an engineering standpoint - it was clear that they were just quick, makeshift workarounds to "fix" problems they didn't fully understand. It took the Ayre engineers over 5x as long to figure out how to make things work properly due to the poor (yet still workable) design of the Chinese copy.
Then to add insult to injury, after Ayre made its complete redesign of the Oppo player, Oppo then made a cheap copy of (mostly) all of the improvements that Ayre had made, and came out with their "SE" (Special Edition") version of the BDP-83 that they sold for $1200. Again they didn't understand *why* Ayre had made the changes, so while they seemed the same on paper to most people, the actual performance improvements were not even close to what Ayre had achieved.
If Oppo had copied *everything* sith the SE version, to actually achieve the same performance Ayre had, it probably would have retailed for at least $3000 or $4000 - significantly less than the Ayre, due to all of the government subsidies, low wages in China, and the hidden cost of dumping toxic waste into the rivers and the illness and diseases of the workers in unsafe conditions. But also assumes they could sell comparable volumes of the $1200 product at 3x or more the price. But then the price would have been too high to maintain the volume of sales required to make such a product profitable - "Catch 22". Like all copies, Oppo was smart enough to copy the features on paper, but without understanding the reasons for the changes, the performance wasn't close to the the original Ayre player.
Ever since then, Oppo has done the exact same thing with all of their succeeding products - make the "standard" version for a low, subsidized-by-the-government price, and a "high-end" version using the same features poorly copied from Ayre's re-design of the BDP-83:
BDP-93 => BDP-95
BDP-103 => BDP-105
UDP-203 => UDP-205
So, yes - you *did* buy the "high-end* version. But it is the cheap Chinese copy of a *real* high-end product. Due to the government subsidies and low direct costs of manufacturing in China (ignoring the hidden costs mentioned above), all of the Oppo products are superb values for the money to the end user. But just because the UDP-205 costs over twice as much as the UDP-203, and offers somewhat improved audio quality, it doesn't make it a truly "high-end" disc player.
To use an analogy, it would be as if Kia (a Korean company) made a copy of a BMW - which is pretty much what they do now. But if you ever drive a BMW and drive a Kia, you will find the exact same thing. The Kia is a great car for the money (also subsidized by the Korean government), but it is *not* in the same class as the original BMW that costs far more money.
In the end, only you, the consumer, can decide if the difference in price is worth the money to you. The BMW is clearly a superior car from virtually every standpoint - performance, reliability, comfort, attention to detail - the list is endless. But for many, the Kia is "good enough" and they will not or can not pay the extra money for the BMW.
It's the same with audio equipment - sort of. The other problem is that the barriers to entry of starting an audio company are about a million times less than the barriers of entry to starting a car company. Then we end up with far too many new audio manufacturers producing virtually identical products than there are customers to buy them. In the "old days" the magazines would provide guidance from experts to help consumers weed out the good from the bad.
But now the magazines are in the same predicament as the audio companies. With the internet, the barriers of entry to publishing are incredibly lower than they were when physical paper had to be printed and distributed. There are *no* print magazines left that cover the computer industry - only online websites. Here is a quote from an article 3 years ago on print magazines in general:
"In the last five years, the retail magazine business has shrunk 40 percent, to less than US $3 billion. And while there were hundreds of magazine wholesalers in the 1990s, the industry has consolidated into just a few major players in recent years: Source Interlink, TNG and Hudson News."
This article was about Source Interlink shutting down its magazine distribution business, leaving only 2 distributors as of 06/01/2014. The fact that Stereophile has been able to maintain a constant *audited* circulation of over 70,000 subscribers and purchasers (with who knows how many passed on to friends) for the last 20+ years is a miracle. And it is all due to the hard work of its editor, John Atkinson.
The only other US print magazine that covers high-end audio is The Absolute Sound (TAS), and they are privately owned by an independently wealthy man, Tom Martin, who made his fortune by being one of the early founders/partners of Dell Computers and given stock options that ended up making him tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. TAS *claims* to have a circulation of over 25,000, but that is just a claim - not audited by anybody. They joined the one legitimate magazine auditing company (ABC - the Audit Bureau of Circulations)h for a few years about a decade ago, but either quit or were fired for not filing accurate reports - I really don't know which. TAS does not make enough money to pay their staff what they think they are worth, so the owner lets them make any side deals they want to increase their personal income. The result is a fairly strict policy of *only* reviewing and recommending products of advertisers - a "pay for play" scenario that is only excepted by a handful of either independently wealthy or retired reviewers that buy or borrow equipment to lend the magazine a facade of legitimacy.
So what is the best source of information? Online forums are a good place to start - but there is *nothing* like hearing a product in your own home, with your own listening room, your own music, and so forth. When you are a total beginner, it can be *extremely* helpful to have some guidance from someone who will actually visit your home and *help* you set things up correctly. A good dealer will do this for someone spending many thousands of dollars.
Other things to do are to find local audiophiles - they are typically a friendly crowd and I am sure there are some in your neck of the woods that would either let you come to their house and hear their system, or even come to your house and help you. There are also audiophile clubs, although the biggest one in your area is the Boston Audio Society - completely useless. All of the members of that club believe that measurements tell us everything, and that since everything measures the same (except loudspeakers), that there is no point in buying anything but the cheapest sources, electronics, and cables - just spend all of your money on speakers, they will tell you. Not helpful at all if you love music.
If you love music, it will not take any time at all to change a component *in a system you are familiar with*, *in a room you are familiar with*, and with music you love *and are familiar with*. Quick A/B testing is only good for one thing - differences in frequency response. But the ear/brain adapts to these changes very quickly.
Have you ever worn a pair of tinted sunglasses? (Blue or yellow or rose?) When you first put them on, the colors are obviously different - but only for a minute or so. Then your brain adapts and all colors look completely normal - until you take them off again, and then it takes another minute or so for your brain to adjust. Frequency response changes are very much the same way - easy to tell in very quick comparisons, but much more difficult when you are listening for long spells - which is pretty much the whole point of listening to music (except as background music, when it doesn't really matter that much).
I literally cannot play my system at home as background music, except at *extremely* low volume levels - if I hear it consciously I will lose my concentration on whatever else I was doing and end up just listening to the music. The Stereophile-associated reviewer for headphones (Tyll Hertsens - pronouced "tile") has his own website dedicated to headphones and headphone amplifiers. In his review of the Pono Player portable player, he describes this phenomenon perfectly. Please click on the link below and just read through to the section called "First Impressions". That is what all music systems should do - be so compelling that you are unable to use it for background music. It should be like a magnet or suction tube that draws you in - whether you want it to or not.
You know you have a great system when you can play any kind of music you like from any genre you like, with any recording quality it happens to have and always find it difficult to turn off and stop listening. Not easy to do, but absolutely possible. Music is part of the human experience - it turns out that language evolved from music and not the other way around. The earliest evidence for any speech communication between Homo sapiens dates back around 50,000 years or so ago. But the oldest known musical instrument even predates Homo sapiens! It was a hollow-bird bone carved with holes to be like what we now call a "flute" or "recorder" dated to around 600,000 years ago and made by Homo neandertalis ("Neanderthals"). The interesting thing is that the holes were spaced to give the same exact pitches found in all modern Western music - a so-called "pentatonic" scale, which has five notes per octave. (Homo neandertalis apparently originated in northern Europe, while Homo sapiens apparently originated in Africa. They coexisted for 1 or 2 hundred thousand years, but when Homo sapiens developed speech, they wiped out Homo neandertalis within a few thousand years - totally extinct. (That is the survival advantage that speech confers to a species.)
One other resource that I recommend is a book by a former dealer/manufacturer's salesman/importer named Jim Smith, called "Get Better Sound". It's completely devoted to helping you get the very best sound from whatever equipment you already own - either for free or for very low cost. He even offers personal consulting - it's not cheap, I think $1 per minute by telephone and around $1000 a day plus expenses - but if you are spending many thousands of dollars, it will definitely pay back in the long run. Or if you can find some locals who will help, it will generally only set you back some beer or at most a meal... :-)
The main thing to do is go slowly, have fun, and never, ever forget to enjoy what you are doing. If it's not fun, it's not worth it.
Best wishes on your journey, and welcome to the "loony bin" of the Audio Asylum"!
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Follow Ups
- Part of the decline of the "high-end" in audio (stupidly long, but possibly worth it) - Charles Hansen 11/8/1715:27:15 11/8/17 (2)
- RE: Part of the decline of the "high-end" in audio (stupidly long, but possibly worth it) - fantja 10:48:24 11/10/17 (0)
- RE: Part of the decline of the "high-end" in audio (stupidly long, but possibly worth it) - Utley1 15:58:58 11/8/17 (0)
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