Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Over the years I've been fortunate enough to have been made aware of Oppo's top-shelf home Blu-Ray/DAC players. I bought new and still own their first generation BDP-95, then later bought the BDP-105 then more recently their BDP-105D with upgraded DAC to decode up to 384/24 and DSD. The capabilities of the 105's are numerous and downright awesome. To be able to input digital audio and video streams then effectively use the player to act as a hub to which all outputs are directed to include multitude HDMI outs has proven useful in the real world. Point being, huge fan of Oppo -- the designers behind their products plus the execution in manufacturing their designs with quality and at a reachable price point for us mortals with taste. While traveling abroad I kinda accidentally came across the idea of bringing hi-res audio on the go. Long train rides, layovers at airports and 10+hour plane rides can obviously get old fast and prompt the wanting for some mobile entertainment beyond the reach of simple crappy airline screens and headsets, etc. So I started researching mobile hi-res players. Many looked pretty cool like the Fosgate and others, I even considered the Onkyo as a bargain all around nice looking option plus would mate well with their hi-res iPhone 6 HF Player. In the end I bought an Audioquest Dragonfly 2.0 and used it both at my residence in the UK and also found a way to make it mobile with my iPhone 6. Big fan of Audioquest digital cables and again the Dragonfly worked awesome. The sound was superb and honestly I thought I'd have in me front pocket for years. Very happy. However it's 96/24 maximum resolution became somewhat cumbersome because I've bought dozens of hi-res tracks in 192/24 so was down converting those to 96/24 via XLD. Now I was (forced to) compiling separate folders for up-to 96/24 then all the others. Not ideal. Then... a week or so later when reading up on one computer audiophile blog or another I saw an ad or read someone's comment about Oppo's new HA-2 mobile DAC. Sorry for the novel here but in short it could play anything, like the BDP-105D, had a similar or same 32-bit Sabre chip inside it. It is exactly the same size as my iPhone 6 and the quality in build from their website video with 3D blow-out portion looked like something you'd expect from Oppo. I've spent almost two weeks with it now and frankly, it's the real deal. Sexy compact and feature packed yes, but the sound quality blew the Dragonfly away even with 44.1 ALACs. The Dragonfly sounded great but the Oppo sounds superb. Just amazing. More money, of course. In the end I couldn't be more happy with my new little toy. I will buy an iPod Touch 128gig the next spare $400. I find, double-side tape the two units together and leave my iPhone 6 free to use for internet, phone, and photos. Not ideal having your smart phone stuck to the hi-res portable player for long. My mobile setup now includes the Oppo, iPhone 6, Sennheiser Momentum 1.0 and Silver Dragon lead from Moon Audio. I can't stop annoying my friends to listen to a track with this setup, it sounds insanely good. And it's mobile. UPDATE: If interested, after a couple weeks owning this I decided to mate it permanently with a new Apple iPod Touch 128gb generation 6 and couldn't be more impressed with the setup. The new upgraded iPod got all the good bits internally -- 64bit architecture and A8 chip so the performance outputting the simple zeros and ones as an audio server only is on par with the iPhone 6. In short, the sound is insanely good and the iPod Touch is tiny tiny and therefore lightweight and doesn't get hot, which is an important bonus. Because the screen is rarely on during playback and the headphone output comes from the Oppo, the battery life of the little iPod is killer. Lasts forever. Also updated, I mated the Oppo with an Audioquest 1.5m Big Sur to hook up the portable DAC to other parts of the house that doesn't have the big Oppo 105s. For example, I took my Shiit Lyre 2 headphone amp with Telefunkten tubes down to the quiet basement last night, hooked it up to the mobile Oppo/iPod setup, threw on my AKG K712 headphones and just chilled out with hardly any hardware to speak of. And it sounds amazing. I realize this is a long post but for those in the know ya know what I'm talking about here and I wanted to share that this is a good product for us nutty audiophiles. - Mark UPDATE 3-months later: So real quick, thought it might be helpful to mention that after some time spent with this unit I can say firstly that yeah it's a bit of a life changer to be honest -- to be able to take with you anywhere hi-quality conversion, changes your options in every facet of your routines. Enough said. But more specifically, FYI experimenting with and changing the interconnect digital USB-A to Lightning cable between the iPod Touch (source in my case) and the Oppo Amp/DAC can yield big changes in sound quality. The stock Oppo cable supplied with the unit works well but it gets better. I've now tried -- bought, burned in 150 hours each, and scrutinized the Moon-Audio 10cm Silver Dragon cable, the V-Moda 10cm cable, an Amazon Basics cable (just because I already owned one to work with an external battery charger), as well as a stock long white Apple cable, and by recommendation from a young man who answered the phone at Oppo itself, a little white 90 degree inexpensive cable bought here on Amazon from Zeskit. The young man at Oppo said he used it himself for his own personal HA-2 and alas thus far has sounded superior to all others, strangely enough. No idea why the Zeskit cable sounds so good by 'maybe' it has something to do with a tag in it's description on Amazon which states, "2.4 amp capacity ensures the fastest charging speeds and data transfer for all iOS devices". In any case, different cables sound very different, for info. I have another lead coming in the post today actually from a gentleman named Konstantine from somewhere up near Norway, his eBay profile name is dtses14. His hand made cable arriving today uses 6N solid silver not unlike the Moon-Audio piece, which I didn't entirely care for it's sound personally, so very curious to see how Konstantine's cable sounds after a proper burn-in. I also have an aim to eventually audition Lightning cables from Furutech called a GT8-A or from their sister brand ADL called iD8-A or L (L has 90 degree termination). There is another expensive option out of Japan from VentureCraft. It's unfortunate these cables sound so different from one another but eventually we'll find the very best and leave it at that. On the other hand it's awesome that they sound so different from one another because when you find that slight improvement, it's not a small detail in the grand scheme. Also I could note that with my medium-sized quite efficient Sennheiser Momentum vs 1.0's w/ Silver Dragon lead from Moon-Audio, the HIGH GAIN mode sounds light years better than the LOW GAIN setting on the Oppo. The high gain setting is still not powerful enough to push large inefficient cans like AKG. The Oppo HA-2 unit gets quite hot, by the way, the higher the resolution the files you send to it and the power consumption gets used up faster the higher the resolution of music. Further, the unit does not get hot when used with its line-level outputs sent to a home studio system, only when driving headphones. More worthless info... for what it's worth I've found the Oppo's internal chip or PCM conversion schemes, or whatever, seem to play nice better with FLACs then ALACs when using Onkyo's HF-Player in the iPod Touch. As a solely Mac desktop/laptop (iTunes) guy without a lot of success finding superior sound using after-market players Auydirvanna, I've not dealt with FLACs virtually at all in my lifetime, but now with this Oppo/Onkyo pairing the option has introduced itself and almost by accident (buying a high-res FLAC album or two when only that codec is available for purchase), as it turns out an identical track in FLAC sounds wholly different that its ALAC equivalent at the same resolution aka 96k vs 96k. The FLACs have a slightly more subdued sound less harsh sound through the Oppo/Onkyo but consistently offers improved detail and separation of instruments and vocals. I may find myself re-importing a whole bunch of staple redbook cd titles for the sole purpose of uploading it to this mobile device. Grrr. Playing with native DXD 384kHz recordings from Norway or Sweden or similar circa 2014, 2015 has been incredible fun now made possible with this Oppo HA-2. Dude. Once you hear these modern recordings at such a high resolution then bit for bit passed along to the sides of your ears through this awesome high quality conversion, is just sick, dwarfing anything I've heard before with regard to clarity and realism. Thank you Oppo. One (1) gig per song being the norm, if ya didn't know. Bring it. Love it. Last note, in the real world having the option to depress the Oppo's Battery Button until it illuminates blue to 'top-up' the iPod Touch's battery, has come in real handy on a couple occasions. The (heavy) battery inside the Oppo's aluminum body seems a mac truck of girth and substance compared to the tiny Apple iDevices'. For info.. Hope this info helps in some small way, sorry so wordy. - Mark