This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below

Swapping NuForce boards for those inclined to do it themselves involves removing the cover, two retainer screws between the analog outputs, three stand-mount screws on the board, two flying leads and pulling out the AC inlet sufficiently to clear the corner. Care must be taken to properly reinsert the raw ribbon cable. Over the NE board the NXE adds an Altera Cyclone III FPGA, an Xpresso clock, a Silabs 552 dual-frequency VCXO, a third voltage regulator and sundry capacitors and bits. It also replaces the output opamps.

The naked truth. Digital marketeers combine laboratory specs, techno verbiage and escalated pricing to conjure up performance realms far beyond the norm. For those who under controlled conditions cannot compare much—most civilians—the premise/promise seems sensible enough. Spend more, improve measurable parameters, get seriously superior sound. Pros (retailers, reviewers, recording engineers) do compare a lot. They find reality rather different. Digital has matured profoundly. Past a level of contemporary core competence of design and execution, there's far less room left to differ in substantial and meaningful ways.


I've done a fair share of digital A/Bs myself. Recently I had opportunity to juxtapose a Human Audio Libretto HD, an APL Hifi NWO-4.0SE, an APL Hifi NWO-M and a LessLoss DAC 2004MkII. The remainder of my friend's system was either a Devialet D-Premier or a Yamamoto A-010 SET with Burson Audio 160 current booster. Speakers were Voxativ's 100dB Ampeggio Dué. While there were differences between digital front ends, they were mostly like admiring different moods of the same landscape at various settings of the sun. It was hard to think flatly in terms of superior/inferior. Regarding actual superiority as something two listeners would agree on per se and specifically as to what and why—cough—the delta of magnitude was not terribly impressive. By now that's my general take on the subject. How far down-market and plebeian can one go in digital to remain in touch with the celebs and glitterati?

Then there were two truths. The $400 NE board strategically alters the distribution of THD to inject a 'triode-type' flavor. As Nelson Pass demonstrated with various FirstWatt transistor amps which exhibit either 2nd or 3rd-order harmonics, listeners divide evenly. Some prefer the sweeter softer thicker flavor of controlled even-order harmonics. Others go for the more incisive pungent energetic flavor of odd-order harmonics. Acceptability for either hinges on carefully controlled amounts; and that the distortion remain low order or simple in nature. You really don't want anything above the 4th or 5th harmonic. There's no secret or surprise who the NuForce Editions are for.


Unlike with speakers where amplitude errors tend to be most obvious to affect tonal balance, competent digital produces no amplitude errors. Minor shifts in THD mean shifted weighting of complementary pairs of performance attributes: separation/coherence, transient/bloom, tension/relaxation, sharp/soft. That's the lighting domain. Bright light is sharp, the contrast between what's lit and what's in the shadows high. Softer light with some cloud cover introduces half shadows. Contrast is lower, half tones are richer. You immediately appreciate how all of these shifts are horizontal. They're not better or worse. They simply move sideways.


Lower noise floors increase audible space (venue sound, recorded ambiance) and thus separation. Separation per se is artificial. It's a playback artifact. In real life there's just one acoustic. Performers and audience share it. In playback there are two acoustics - recorded venue and playback venue. The more resolution is applied, the greater the separation becomes between virtual and actual acoustics. It's just a trick and not one equally valued by all. If you enjoy it, more separation means the performance went up. That's a vertical move. If your preferred experiential mode is immersive—you do not want to feel like a separate observer of two (really conflicting) realities—the intrusion of a powerful other/alien acoustic could distract. Then you'd adjudge the performance as going down. That too is vertical.

Your truth? The $899 NXE board doesn't alter the triode flavor. It does however improve separation, ambient recovery and with it perceived resolution by a noticeable margin. The above explained why reactions to that needn't be unanimous. Listeners drawn to NOS sound (Kusunoki-style zero-sampling digital without filtering) and its organic core flavor of relaxation, ease and a softer treble should in fact favor the cheaper NE board. To my ears the NXE has higher conformity with 'modern' digital. Though presumably intact, the 2nd-order flavor seems less apparent. For video where dynamic range—the loudness differential between foreground dialogue and background din—is often a lot higher than it is for most contemporary music, the NXE would generally seem preferable. It heightens magnification of those elements. Its greater treble energy also means added crispness. For predominantly 'visual' listening, the NXE should lead. Those are the two options on hand.


In either case connecting the Oppo to a television screen during stereo listening means you see artist, album, track and time information displayed against an unobtrusive blackground. As a modern FPGA-steered machine, firmware updates are downloadable from the mother site. I installed a whole update folder by unzipping it to a USB drive. Upon inserting that into the Oppo's frontal USB slot it automatically looked for the folder, auto-installed the contents and then ran its scripts in sequence after being prompted for each via the remote control. It then automatically shut down to require a restart with the new settings committed to its control logic.
.

What the smart money really wants to know is just how far outside their price range the NuForce Editions can punch. Here I'm sadly the wrong guy to ask. By transitioning to PCfi more than a year ago I've lost touch with the ± $2.000 range of CD players one would want to compare. But I can do you one better. Enter Alex Peychev's final iteration of his NWO rebuilds for Esoteric's top one-box universal players. It goes simply by 'M' for master (NWO meanwhile is shorthand for new world order). It retains merely the Japanese chassis, user interface and massive VRDS transport. Digital conversion after the Bulgarian makeover is via twenty AKM AK4399EQ chips per channel. Those are run with bypassed digital filters. This allows data processing "at up to 1.728MHz and 32 bits". The dual-differential E182CC tube output stage couples through amorphous-core Lundahl output transformers. A built-in modified M2Tech hiFace does 24/192 asynchronous USB. An included Sony remote allows easy switching between the stock internal transport and the retrofitted BNC and USB digital inputs.


Connecting the Oppo/NuForce NXE to my Bent Audio Tap-X preamp, its digital output to the NWO-M's BNC input to A/B a $1.399 player with one upward of $20.000, I'll simply say that the modified Oppo is a shocker. In the context of an all Zu Event wired system with ModWright KWA-100SE amp and Mark+Daniel Fantasia S speakers, the advantage in presence, tonal fullness and suavity of the Esoteric/APL was unbelievably minor. Detractors could blame my system or my ears for lack of ultimate resolution. I still wager that 95% of our readers would be in the same boat with regard to biological and techno hardware. Of course the NuForce does nothing for high-end credibility. It's a polyester suit. But as a very informed, strategic 'insider-trading' buy it's pure bespoke Saville Row. That makes it an option the competition should really wish was illegal.

Not having heard the stock Oppo I have no reference for the NuForce mod. Hence no award considerations. And even though it's explained by economics of scale, $400 for a swap board in a $499 player seems a bit skewed. I suspect—but can't be certain—that the primary change is from 3rd/5th-order to 2nd-order THD as a sideways move into a different flavor. That should be akin to a very transparent triode tube buffer stage which probably would cost $400 or more from the usual suspects. From a cheapskate angle the $899 board becomes harder to stomach. Unlike with the NE board however, its effect is vertical and I suspect for many who shop in these leagues a clear up rather than down move.


Then there's this. €5.000 and €10.000 fall-back spinners in my crib can't do SACD or DVD-A, never mind BluRay. Even my NWO-M goes blue in the face trying to do blu for real. Already the base Oppo should be one scary operator particularly if video was your prime application. For home theater the brain seniority of sight over sound becomes equalizer on audio. It's why I would never spend real big bucks on it. It's why I'd never need more than one of these Oppos. And you could always run the stock Oppo as transport into a designer DAC if you think the differences worthwhile. Based on the above comparison I simply suspect that Alex Dondysh is one ace digital wizard. The fact that Dan Wright too collaborates with him nearly cements that to conviction. To do better in any meaningful ways should cost significantly. And then you might still stretch to reach meaningful.


In the end and outside the circle of hardcore audiophiles with their engrained belief systems and tendency to make mountains out of mole hills, I'm quite comfortable proposing that either of these modified units really could be that last physical disc player anyone should need (at least until they opt for Apple's cloud to relinquish ownership of media to mere access rights). That Oppo can make never mind sell this player for $499 is an eye opener. In $1.399 NuForce NXE guise it's bona fide high end on sonics and features but not perception or wallet pain. That sounds to me just what current economics asked for to keep this hobby attainable for more people.
NuForce website
Enlarge!