Oppo 980 or Arcam DV88+?

[Basil Plumley]

I'm in a bit of a dillema as to a DVD player and was wondering if anybody has any input on these for me...
At the moment, I use a Sony BD-P350 which isn't exactly the last thing when it comes to DVD playback...

I'm looking at 2 secondhand players - first one is an Oppo 980 which I'm bidding on on the bay...it's at less than £45 at the mo with a day to go - so if I'm lucky, I could get that for less than fifty quid.
Looking at that in particular for it's 576i/480i output via HDMI to feed into the Anchor Bay scaler in my Yamaha RX-V3800 for feeding into my Optoma HD73...

The second one is a second hand Arcam DV88+ - on the forums for £190 but I might be able to knock him down a bit if I'm lucky...I'm looking at this one in particular for it's music playback which means I could in effect do away with a box on the rack - I have a dedicated CD player at the moment.
This would be fed into the amp via component and hopefully output and interlaced signal into the Anchor Bay scaler.

My heart says the Arcam but my head says the Oppo...DVD-A and SACD playback are not that important to me to be honest - but top notch DVD playback and CD playback are...

[bosque]

I'd be tempted to go for the Arcam, mainly because I own one (the trouble is I've heard good things as well about the Oppo). I managed to get an 88+ back in 2004 for £600, which was a bargain at the time because they'd been selling for £1,000. The more expensive DVD players do have very good CD playback. I had a standalone Arcam 7SE CD player and the 88+ is every bit the equal of that. With upscaling and Plasma/LCD HDTVs it can be hard to recall what the CRT image looked like, but I can still remember being amazed at seeing what the 88+ on a Sony 32" CRT for the first time did to a DVD PQ, (and what a new lease of life it gave to my DVD collection).

[Avi]

Originally Posted by Don Lafontaine

I'm in a bit of a dillema as to a DVD player and was wondering if anybody has any input on these for me...
At the moment, I use a Sony BD-P350 which isn't exactly the last thing when it comes to DVD playback...

I'm looking at 2 secondhand players - first one is an Oppo 980 which I'm bidding on on the bay...it's at less than £45 at the mo with a day to go - so if I'm lucky, I could get that for less than fifty quid.
Looking at that in particular for it's 576i/480i output via HDMI to feed into the Anchor Bay scaler in my Yamaha RX-V3800 for feeding into my Optoma HD73...

The second one is a second hand Arcam DV88+ - on the forums for £190 but I might be able to knock him down a bit if I'm lucky...I'm looking at this one in particular for it's music playback which means I could in effect do away with a box on the rack - I have a dedicated CD player at the moment.
This would be fed into the amp via component and hopefully output and interlaced signal into the Anchor Bay scaler.

My heart says the Arcam but my head says the Oppo...DVD-A and SACD playback are not that important to me to be honest - but top notch DVD playback and CD playback are...

The Oppo 980 is a decent digital transport and has a good mpeg decoder that provides a clean interlaced signal over HDMI. Some mpeg decoders suffer from CUE (chroma upsampling error) and I seem to recall this was an issue with Zoran products that is used in the Arcam. I've no personal experience of the DV88+ so can't say for sure if this is an issue but it's worth checking. The other area I'd check is the component signal standard in the AVR as using analogue will be more demanding in terms of signal quality/processing to produce the best result.

AVI

[Lakes_Puma]

Originally Posted by Don Lafontaine

I'm in a bit of a dillema as to a DVD player and was wondering if anybody has any input on these for me...
At the moment, I use a Sony BD-P350 which isn't exactly the last thing when it comes to DVD playback...

I'm looking at 2 secondhand players - first one is an Oppo 980 which I'm bidding on on the bay...it's at less than £45 at the mo with a day to go - so if I'm lucky, I could get that for less than fifty quid.
Looking at that in particular for it's 576i/480i output via HDMI to feed into the Anchor Bay scaler in my Yamaha RX-V3800 for feeding into my Optoma HD73...

The second one is a second hand Arcam DV88+ - on the forums for £190 but I might be able to knock him down a bit if I'm lucky...I'm looking at this one in particular for it's music playback which means I could in effect do away with a box on the rack - I have a dedicated CD player at the moment.
This would be fed into the amp via component and hopefully output and interlaced signal into the Anchor Bay scaler.

My heart says the Arcam but my head says the Oppo...DVD-A and SACD playback are not that important to me to be honest - but top notch DVD playback and CD playback are...

Grrrr!

So it was you I was bidding against last night.

[Basil Plumley]

Originally Posted by Lakes_Puma

Grrrr!

So it was you I was bidding against last night.

No - my maximum bid was £60 mate - after that I didn't bid again. They go on here for that in the classifieds quite often...hope you didn't pay £109 for it!!

[Lakes_Puma]

Originally Posted by Don Lafontaine

No - my maximum bid was £60 mate - after that I didn't bid again. They go on here for that in the classifieds quite often...hope you didn't pay £109 for it!!

Yup, fraid I did , I've been watching the classifieds for a while and not seen one (seen loads of 983's) but as I was going to buy one new I figured that £109 was a saving of nearly £70.

The last ones I could find on completed classifieds went for £90-£110 so my purchase price seems about right.

[jimborae]

For that kind of money you should be able to get an Arcam DV79 although some including myself would argue that the DV88+ has better cd playback than the DV79. Wouldn't pay more than £140 for a DV88+ and even then it would have to mint.

[Lakes_Puma]

Well I took delivery of my 980 and connected it all up and I was horrified!

Using DVE as a reference the first thing I notice was panning shots were very jerky and the whole image looked blurred.

I was very disappointed as it wasn't a patch on the Denon 3910 I'd just got rid of.

Then I started to dig into the menus and noticed that the TV type as still at the default which was NTSC, I changed this to PAL and performed a factory reset while I was about it and the results were much better.

Motion became fluid as I expected it to be.

After a little bit of tweeking (due to lack of time) the results were very favourable.

I wouldn't say it was better than the Denon (more tweeks and tests may change this) but it was certainly no worse, which is what I was after and a great testament to the Oppo considering its price even when new.