Oppo Sonica USB DAC and Streamer Review

[wwenze]

Killing it back then. What a cruel reality Oppo had to go under, while others persist with nonsense.

Btw this is digital volume control right? So perfect matching channels?

Nonsense gets you profit margins

While good engineers are never paid enough

Look at the lower-end computer speaker market and see what brands are left

 

[XaVierDK]

I realize I'm being quite harsh here. But I think back and wonder how many people were dissuaded from purchasing this Oppo for example, and instead went with some other nonsense that was praised by these guys.

My thoughts exactly. There's likely zero reasoning behind their subjective "review", and their claims of differences to their reference are likely either fabrications or psychoacoustic.
Imagine Oppo going under because of reviews like this. That's one of life's biggest ironies.

 

[wwenze]

I understand why the hate...
but...

Most of the conclusions of objective reviews are also "below audibility". Heck, objective reviewers are way more likely to say "there is no difference/there is virtually no difference/you can't hear the difference".

If everybody stopped buying because they all know "you can't hear the difference", we won't have $1000 DACs.
But thanks to "audiophiles", the market of $1000 DACs was created. This then allowed Oppo to dump money into the R&D.

Unfortunately, to do well in this $1000 market, what you need to spend is not R&D. It is convincing people why they need to spend $1000. Oppo's method is the objective performance. Which nobody knew or cared.

 

[Piotr]

It's interesting to read what whathifi.com wrote about this unit:

"(...) rather spiritless sound coupled with the high price tag (...)"

https://www.whathifi.com/oppo/sonica-dac/review

 

[dmac6419]

They wanted to sell DVD and BluRay players and that market dried up,that was my take why thy went out of business.

 

[frogmeat69]

Loved Oppo stuff, still have 2 of their Blu ray players and dread the day they might start having problems.

 

[twofires]

I'm convinced What Hifi are just a review generating script that picks hifi jargon from an array.

"[Oodles] of [rhythmic] [oomph], but not [the final word] on [mid bass] [clarity]."

For all of Stereophile's verbiage, I'm at least satisfied that they are real people who have actually heard the products they are talking about.

 

[Tks]

I understand why the hate...
but...

Most of the conclusions of objective reviews are also "below audibility". Heck, objective reviewers are way more likely to say "there is no difference/there is virtually no difference/you can't hear the difference".

If everybody stopped buying because they all know "you can't hear the difference", we won't have $1000 DACs.
But thanks to "audiophiles", the market of $1000 DACs was created. This then allowed Oppo to dump money into the R&D.

Unfortunately, to do well in this $1000 market, what you need to spend is not R&D. It is convincing people why they need to spend $1000. Oppo's method is the objective performance. Which nobody knew or cared.

And we now get to the problem of society's priorities, and educational systems that produce this acute case of uninformed consumer culture.

It's like economies and governments have given up on the idea of basing their existence on informed consumers and citizens. I guess they'd rather have mules to kick around and gut whenever they need to, as a form of neo slavery of sorts. Keep 'em smart enough to do jobs like cogs. But not too smart as.. well.. who needs that headache eh?

 

[KxDx]

I understand why the hate...
but...

Most of the conclusions of objective reviews are also "below audibility". Heck, objective reviewers are way more likely to say "there is no difference/there is virtually no difference/you can't hear the difference".

If everybody stopped buying because they all know "you can't hear the difference", we won't have $1000 DACs.
But thanks to "audiophiles", the market of $1000 DACs was created. This then allowed Oppo to dump money into the R&D.

Unfortunately, to do well in this $1000 market, what you need to spend is not R&D. It is convincing people why they need to spend $1000. Oppo's method is the objective performance. Which nobody knew or cared.

The key to success is making a mediocre product and throwing huge advertiser money behind it. These " reviewers" are scoring you on the size of the check, not the quality of the product.

 

[digicidal]

The key to success is making a mediocre product and throwing huge advertiser money behind it. These " reviewers" are scoring you on the size of the check, not the quality of the product.

Bose and Monster Cable agree with you... but it seems even that gravy train does have an expiration date - it's just billions of dollars and decades later.

 

[wwenze]

They wanted to sell DVD and BluRay players and that market dried up,that was my take why thy went out of business.

Then again, scaler and audio aside, can you tell the difference between a $30 HDMI player and a $1000 one?

 

[KxDx]

Bose and Monster Cable agree with you... but it seems even that gravy train does have an expiration date - it's just billions of dollars and decades later.

Monster let a big one get away when the lost Beats to Apple.

Bose is still thriving on its name and the fact that most people equate loudness with SQ. Good for them I guess.

 

[XaVierDK]

Monster let a big one get away when the lost Beats to Apple.

Bose is still thriving on its name and the fact that most people equate loudness with SQ. Good for them I guess.

I'd argue Beats was losing steam before Apple bought the brand. Monster didn't know how to maintain interest once they got the reputation for muddy, bloated, overpriced garbage.
Which is fitting because Monster always has been surviving on marketing alone. You can get away with that when you just have to not muck up a product such as cables. When you have to produce something actually worthwhile to turn a profit, well.... That's harder.

 

[Billy Budapest]

No, they are a Chinese company.

Actually, Oppo Digital was a California company, with development, design, and engineering done in the U.S. Their parent company, BBK Electronics, is a Chinese company. BBK might have been involved in some aspects of the engineering but at least a significant portion was done in the US.

 

[Billy Budapest]

I'd argue Beats was losing steam before Apple bought the brand. Monster didn't know how to maintain interest once they got the reputation for muddy, bloated, overpriced garbage.
Which is fitting because Monster always has been surviving on marketing alone. You can get away with that when you just have to not muck up a product such as cables. When you have to produce something actually worthwhile to turn a profit, well.... That's harder.

Actually, Beats first separated itself from Monster and contracted with HTC to do manufacturing. They saw the writing on the wall about Monster and wanted out. A year or two later, Apple bought Beats.

 

[Russ_L]

Currently Oppo holds 8.7% of the worldwide cell phone market. Dwarfs anything they could do with blueray players.

https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/vendor

Russ

 

[Soniclife]

I bought this right after launch and returned it because it didn't have gapless playback support over DLNA and Oppo had no plans to fix it.

I'm still appalled that companies think this is ok, it's infinite distortion every few mins. No music player should ever have been released like this, even with lossy files.

 

[Billy Budapest]

Currently Oppo holds 8.7% of the worldwide cell phone market. Dwarfs anything they could do with blueray players.

https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/vendor

Russ

It’s not the same Oppo company making the phones. Oppo Electronics, the phone company, was separate from Oppo Digital, the universal player and personal audio company. They both had common ownership, BBK Electronics, but were separate operations.

 

[dmac6419]

Then again, scaler and audio aside, can you tell the difference between a $30 HDMI player and a $1000 one?

Yea,can you?

 

[617]

I occasionally people who like music but have never needed it. They have what I consider bad taste in music. There are also people who like objective information but have never truly needed it. For them, writing reviews like this is easy enough.