oppo's volume control

Again George, OPPO says not to use the 103 without a preamp, I suggest you phone them directly and they will set you straight. Here's part of an email a reader shared in which Oppo tells him to use a preamp.

Erin,

If you will be using the player as the pre-amplifier, then you will want to use the BDP-105. The BDP-103 has 24-bit DACs and has a low signal to noise floor, so it will likely produce audio truncations if you use the player's built-in volume controls and a hum will always be present as the amplifier will always be amplifying the noise floor.

If you are running through a pre-amplifier, or another device which will be doing the volume controls, then the BDP-103 will work in your configuration.

Best Regards,

Customer Service
OPPO Digital, Inc.
2629B Terminal Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
Service@oppodigital.com
Tel: 650-961-1118
Fax: 650-961-1119

It's kind of funny how you insist that preamps add "colouration" when such a blanket statement is obviously off base. I will leave you to your notions, I don't think I can help you further, it appears that your preferences are quirky.

Cheers,
Runnin'

If you looked 7 post up I don't have to phone them, I got the answer for you already from the head of technical at Oppo above.
Oppo's email to me, the reason is because of "bit striping" at volumes below 80, that's why it's not recommended, not because it makes noises when it's played direct to poweramps.
Any tech will tell you that noises such as you explained you are getting are not conducive to a cdp that's in healthy condition.
The only reason your Parasound P7 pre is not passing it through is because it's a capacitor coupled preamp, and capacitors block dc spikes.
As I said if you were to use a dc coupled preamp such as Pass Labs, Krell ect, you will find the noises are back again, just like they are when you go direct to the poweramp.

Cheers George

Oh, I see you are making more assumptions on my gear. Read this carefully, I get no noises on my Oppo 103 now. That's right, it's all good, I only had the issue after running it after a week using the analog jacks, but it hasn't been hooked up that way for 6 months or so. I use it for movies, Roku and streaming music to occasionally and it's flawless in all situations. It really made me an Oppo fan for life after the stellar performance of the 95 I have in the 2 channel system with the P7.

I'm not sure what you are on about regarding the P7, a well known characteristic about Parasound products is that there are no caps in the signal path but since you wrongly guessed that the Oppo's had analog volumes in your first post, and also thought Oppo output impedance is under 200 ohms(way off according to my Oppo 95 manual), I submit to you that you might want to ensure you get your facts and details sorted before posting.

No assumptions Runnin, no need to get defensive any tech will tell you, just look at the factory specs on your P7, the FR (frequency response) is curtailed at at 5hz!! this means it's capacitor coupled within it's circuit, for if it was not capacitor coupled the specs would show DC -100khz.

Cheers George

Yeah, I just looked up your track record on this forum, George. Seems you hate preamps, and have posted again and again on how bad they are, and don't seem to realize you're getting a bad reputation around here.

You were wrong about Oppo's having an analog volume, wrong about Oppo's having output impedance under 200 ohms and wrong about the P7 having caps in the signal path. I'm not going to do any more research on your claims George. When called out about the above, you simply ignore the facts as if they don't matter since they disagree with your world view. That's kind of weird.

The thing is, I no longer can trust you know what you're talking about or that you aren't a 19 yr old kid sitting at his mom's computer trying to get other posters worked up. Go see Godzilla or something, kid.