Mobile Fidelity (Iago, have tissues handy to clean up your mess)

Last five titles:

http://www.mofi.com/store/pc/viewCategories.asp?pageStyle=p&idCategory=28

@#$!!!$%!#$$!!@#!!!!


Lotta money, and I am going to have to spend it.



By the way, I did pick up the regular CD of The Sky is Crying to replace my cherished MFSL Ultradisc CD, and the sound quality is disappointing in comparison. But SACD? Goodbye disposable income.

Thought you might like. I will be buying as soon as the discs are available.

Shoulda hung on to my gift card. I picked up the Blu-Rays for Spartacus: Blood and Sand, Generation Kill, Dune, House of the Devil, Centurion, The Thin Red Line, and The Fly instead.

I was looking at the Music Direct site and you can preorder the discs through them. I generally order my MoFi titles through Music Direct, as they offer better international shipping rates. International shipping directly from MoFi starts at $50 or $60!

Apparently, if you preorder, you're guaranteed to get lower numbered discs, if that kind of thing matters to you.

It would if I kept them sealed.

Exactly. You could always buy two copies . . .

My co-worker's brother-in-law just ran into a situation where he now wishes he had bought two copies of a MoFi disc. I'm not sure of the exact title, but apparently he had a copy of a MoFi John Lee Hooker disc. His six-year-old son got his hands on the disc and snapped it in two. He claims that he will have to pay nearly $100 to replace the disc through private channels.

Oh, I have just had to let my missing discs go. I would really love to replace Tales of Mystery and Imagination, since even the newest remaster fails to match the quality that MoFi did over ten years ago, but it is waaaaay too expensive.

Instead of a new phone, you could have gotten new discs . . .

The purchase of the phone was a bit more pragmatic. Necessity must occasionally intervene.

Necessity is such a nuisance.

Necessity is the mother of strange bedfellows.

Looking good and dressing well is a necessity. Having a purpose in life is not.

purpose = necessity = looking good and dressing well

(Just an observation which is undoubtedly out of place in this discussion.)

There were observations that were IN place in this discussion? You forget who you are dealing with here!

Observations worthy of an Oscar.

Ethelred clearly overestimated us. I felt obligated to disavow him of that notion.

It was the decent and honest thing to do.

At least we both have those two qualities in our favor. Not many other ones, but we should take what we can get.

Switching back to SACDs for a moment: Can you permanently tell your Oppo to always play the two-channel layer of an SACD (assuming it's available)? Or does it always default to the multichannel layer? Furthermore, if an SACD only has a multichannel layer and you were using the Oppo's dedicated stereo outs, would the Oppo downmix the multichannel into stereo, or would it only play the front-left and front-right channels?

You can set SACD priority on the Oppos to either 2-channel or multichannel and the player will automatically switch to the preferred layer. If you want to listen to a different layer than the priority layer, it is a simple matter of pressing the "audio" button and you can switch (though it will return to the beginning of the current track when you do so, so you cannot truly switch "on the fly.") I have mine set to prioritize the 2-channel layer and rarely listen to multichannel.

If you are using the 2 channel outputs and play a mutichannel only disc (or select the multichannel layer) then the player will downmix all channels. So you cannot use the 2 channel outputs for L and R while using the multichannel outputs for the rest, since you will get those channels mixed into the mains as well. Some people have wanted to do that since the DACs on the 2-channel outputs are superior to those in the multichannel outputs, and if you could use the 2-channel for the L/R and the multichannel C/SL/SR you would theoretically get better sound quality. The automatic (and undefeateable) downmix on the 2-channel outputs precludes that.

Thank you.

I have heard some people argue that downmixing multichannel to stereo is undesirable, so I was curious what the Oppo's limitations were.

In a music-only and stereo-only set-up, would you stick with the Oppo for SACD or would you opt for a dedicated SACD player?

If you do not want downmixed audio, you could always use the main L/R outputs of the multichannel outs and disconnect the cables from the other channels. (You could turn off the outputs via the menu, but then you would get downmixing again.)




As with anything in life, what to do comes out to what you wish to spend. The Oppo provides excellent performance for the price, but you can certainly do better with a dedicated player if you want to spend more. Granted, a universal player like the Oppo does give you more options if you change you mind and decide to use the player for other purposes. A dedicated SACD player -- especially the two-channel only variety -- will only do what it was born to do.

If you disconnect cables, wouldn't you lose the other channels? For example, am I correct in assuming a signal might still be sent to the rears or the centre channel, but you'd never hear it?

As for your advice, you are absolutely correct and pretty much summed up my own thoughts.

If you disconnect all but the main channels when listening to a multichannel disc, you will indeed lose the signals, but your only choice is to do that and accept the loss or else to accept the downmixing. I thought that you were looking for alternatives to downmixing, and that is all that there is.

By the way, the Oppo does a very good job of downmixing multichannel signals. If you are listening to a multichannel only disc in a two channel setup, I think that you will not be disappointed.