Oppo BDP-83SE NuForce Edition
Blu-ray Player

With its high-performance audio board, here's a Blu-ray player even stereo Luddites will appreciate

Oppo BDP-83SE NuForce Edition

If the Oppo BDP-83SE NuForce Edition looks familiar, it's because it is. This is a Special Edition of Oppo's long-lost European Blu-ray debutant, the BDP-83, with some additional pixie dust from NuForce.

NuForce is an American brand, which is best known for selling high-performance amplifiers and pre/power solutions. It offers a CD player and media server, but this modified Oppo is the company's first venture into the world of Blu-ray.

The original BDP-83 was reviewed way back in 2009. At the time, the brand was on the verge of setting up a UK base to develop its Blu-ray range. At the last minute, though, that plan seemed to collapse, and the BDP-83 was never given its proper release. Oppo's invasion of the UK was over almost as quickly as it had begun.

So what's the story with this NuForce Edition? To find out more, we'll need to take a peek under the hood.

The player itself is the same battleship grade deck we saw on the standard version. It looks expensive and is reassuringly heavy. The unit has a distinctive textured front panel, with centrally placed mecha-deck and a USB input neatly disguised by a rubber bung.

A universal model, it can play Super Audio CDs and DVD Audio discs, as well as the usual roster of BD, DVD and CD platters.

Back panel connections include HDMI, component and 7.1 analogue audio outputs, stereo phono outputs, coaxial and optical digital audio, LAN and a second USB port. For an audiophile special, it's perhaps surprising that balanced outputs haven't been added.

Dream streaming

For a BD player with audiophile pretensions, you might not expect too much in the way of networked media playback, but this BDP-83 SE has some surprises in store.

From its home screen, you can scour your network for attached PCs and NAS devices and then start scrabbling around for content. Regretfully, file support is not that extensive. While it could see and play MKV-wrapped hi-def material and MPEGs, it was oblivious to AVI and DivX over my network.

Playback from local USB flash drives fared better. From here, MKV playback was joined by those errant file types. The player can even play .srt subtitles.

Audio playback is limited to MP3s; surprisingly there's no support for more esoteric music file formats, such as FLAC. That said, I was impressed to find that when the player streamed music from my audio server, it also recognised and displayed the sleeve artwork I had sitting in the folder.

The deck also has access to a very modest online content portal, dubbed Blu-TV. Contrary to its salacious handle, there's little of interest here to inflame the extremities. The current Blu-TV offering breaks down into innocuous widgets, games and channels. At the time of writing, only one channel is available: Urban Trek - a UGC (User Generated Content) guide to US cities, with Flickr pictures and hotel and restaurant reviews.

Navigation is hopeless, so I didn't feel inclined to persevere. Unless you really feel a need to play Solitaire or Sudoku through your Blu-ray deck, I don't think this will get much use.

DAC'll do nicely

NuForce's stated objective is to improve the analogue audio performance of this deck above the base model. So the power supply has been blessed with some new circuitry and Sabre DACs drafted in to replace the original's Cirrus Logic DACs.

A single 8-channel Sabre DAC feeds the multichannel analogue output, while the stereo feed gets a particularly high-end audiophile solution, in the shape of an ESS Sabre32 DAC divided equally between the two channels.

NuForce has made other less obvious (but quite inventive) changes, including removing redundant capacitors from the stereo signal path (it assumes the player will be partnered with pre-amps and AVRs which already have DC blocking circuits) in an effort to maximise signal quality.

The company has also disabled the player's muting circuits, which silence any DAC operations which may generate noise. This tweak is a little contentious, as those muting circuits are there for a reason and that's to prevent unpleasant pops and buzzes.

You need to get into the habit of turning on the player before your amp, as well as killing the volume when you hop from PCM to DSD in the Audio Setup screen.

Just to reiterate, all these audio improvements relate to the player's analogue board. You will not benefit if you just route audio over HDMI.

Reflecting its refinement, the deck delivers a very low 155.4ps of analogue jitter. The BD83's audio settings allow SACD DSD to bitstream directly to compatible (in all probability Sony) receivers; however, the engineers at NuForce suggest that converting to PCM in the player (aka Forced PCM Mode) before going to the Sabre32 DAC is 'close to identical'. It's a suck-it-and-see exercise.