OPPO's BDP-80 Blu-ray/SACD/DVD-A player - coming 1/25/10!

I just stumbled onto this thread, and didn't want to review twelve pages so...does this player do anything special with HDCDs?

 

It plays them.

 

I'm wondering if anyone here could help with some setting I must have wrong somewhere. I bought my BDP-80 back in the summer more as a back-up player to my Pioneer DVL-909, and to handle all of the scratched-up rental discs my wife would bring home for family movie night that the Pioneer would end up spitting out or freezing on. I was still using the Pioneer for all of our nicer Dolby 5.1 DVDs.

Fast forward to the Pioneer now having mechanical problems I'm not sure will be fixable at this point, and I'm trying to get the Oppo to playback in full Dolby 5.1. with limited success. I have it connected to the TV with HDMI, and to a Pioneer VSX-D906S via the optical cable into the DVD audio port.

Previous to this weekend all the default settings were being used in the Oppo set-up, and I was getting what I would call "Dolby surround" output playing during DVDs. I would hear ambient sounds out of the rear speakers, nothing particularly defined out of the front 3 (more just a stereo-ish sound), and the 5.1 indicator lights on the D906S would not be active.

This weekend I did some reading online and found a few generally suggested setting changes in the Oppo set-up menus (like setting the optical/coax to bitstream, and setting the speaker configuration from 7.1 down to 5.1 like I have in the room). Now the Pioneer is lighting up the 5.1 indicator lights, and the front 3 speakers are sounding like they should, but there is no sound at all from the two rear speakers.

One Oppo setting I wasn't sure about in the audio section is under DVD and the default is DVD audio. Should I change that to DVD video to get the rear speakers to work properly? If so, will that need to be changed back if I play a hi-res DVD disc made from the recent Wings and Harrison files released? Or is it something else that I have missed somewhere?

I figured there would be just one correct way to have this set up to properly reproduce 5.1 surround and hi-res audio because the Laserdisc player did it all without changing any settings. Hopefully someone here can point me in the right direction to make that happen.

 

If all 5.1 are lighting up, everything should be OK. Make sure you have selected the 5.1 Dolby Digital or DTS track from the DVD movie menu, otherwise you might be getting some version of Dolby Prologic.

You can leave it on DVD-Audio.

You won't need to change anything, once you get it working properly.

Just make sure the OPPO digital output is set to Bitream, and your Pioneer receiver is set to Auto format decode.

 

That's what I thought too, that it should be OK, but it's not. Of course I had the 5.1 Dolby Digital track selected, otherwise those lights wouldn't have been on. That Pioneer receiver was right before DTS, so I can't use those tracks... or can I now? The Oppo doesn't actually decode the DTS, does it? That would be a sweet bonus I wasn't expecting.

Just curious, what does the DVD-Video choice in that audio setting section do? I was thinking it might mean whether the player is reading from the VIDEO_TS folder or the AUDIO_TS folder-- and these days it seems there is rarely anything in the AUDIO_TS folder on a DVD.

This is good news once it works properly.

I do have the Bitstream setting done. I'll poke around with a few more buttons and hopefully not screw anything up more than it is.

Thank you for the reply Sam.

 

I have it playing full 5.1 audio now--all is well with the world.

 

Great news!

 

New public beta firmware available for this player today. Been using it for a little while, seems fairly stable to me:

http://oppodigital.com/blu-ray-bdp-80/bdp-80-firmware-21-0402.aspx

 

Thanks, Sam. I've been waiting for this.