Has anyone bought the OPPO 105 and has an opinion

I find it to be sensational. It replaced a very fine Lavry fed by a good Panasonic CD player. Soundstages beautifully and with the right material extends easily past the speakers. Great sense of depth. Terrific dynamics and strong and detailed bass. Very revealing, so watch out for poorly engineered disks. Needs tons of break-in. It encourages me to buy SACDs, including the old RCAs which are wonderful and inexpensive. It is Avery Fischer Hall rather than Carnegie, so system matching matters. For me it makes digital much more competitive with my vinyl. Among the joys is putting youtube videos up wirelessly on the screen and enjoying many performances with excellent video and audio that are available. They're getting better all the time. Much more enjoyable than watching on the computer. I should add that I'm only using two channels of it. And did I mention that it needs tons of break-in.

Also, the Sony and Oppo 95 are compared directly at: http://www.stereophile.com/content/music-round-50-page-2-0

Not a comment, but rather a question. Why can you not believe that the $1200 Oppo can sound better than the $3500 Ayre? Does price rule all? Reviews of the Ayre were middling. TAS review of the Oppo was a rave. But don't expect a full review of the Oppo in Stereophile. Their objective measurements of it might embarrass very expensive advertising competitors.

P59teitel, I really have no dog in this fight, but that I prefer a company that has a marketing plan that includes me, to wit, price competitively and sell a lot of units..

First, when we speak about modern reviews, no one gets a bad review these days. It's all about advertising and all about how many adoring words the reviewer can dig out of the thesaurus. So all modern reviews have to be read between the lines IMO. And I look only at those in the paper mags as having any real value at all.

But actually, let me admit an error here. I was really writing about the $9950 Ayre DX-5 which in its features is the Ayre directly competitive with the Oppo 105. In fact, it is based, in part, on an old Oppo design

In its review Stereophile includes the following about this $10,200 (in black) player:

"The Ayre DX-5 was a pleasant-sounding SACD player, but its performance wasn't spellbinding.

"The Ayre's soundstage was also smaller than I expected from this SACD in both width and depth.

"Bryan Ferry's voice seemed diffuse and recessed through the DX-5, perhaps because the reverberant backdrop blended with his voice instead of separating out in space.

"but I could get only a blue screen, and the default audio mode was DTS-HD Master Audio. It appears that there are still glitches to be ironed out of Blu-ray–Audio."

There are similar caveats in the (now 5 and 10 year old) reviews of the CX-7 and CX-7e in the paper mags for these $3000+ CD only players, this in a very fast moving field.