Oppo 81

Will the Oppo 81 carry DVD Audio/SACD over HDMI to the 990's DVI connection ?
My Monitor has no HDMI connection, will it matter going HDMI to 990 then Component Video ( RGB ) to monitor?

Are you talking about the 981HD ?

The 990's DVI input is video only - it will not accept any audio. You would need to connect coaxial or optical for CD and DVD audio, and multichannel analog for DVD-Audio and SACD. Also, the DVI switching is independent from analog video switching. This is partly related to the way the 990's video switching is designed (composite and s-video are transcoded to component but nothing is transcoded to DVI) and partly an issue of industry standards (receivers and processors that convert DVI or HDMI to component are basically nonexistent, and products like HD Fury are the only hardware methods in place that can take a digital video signal and make it into an analog video signal).

Guess then I can't get rid of all those RCA cables then.
I replaced my Marantz 7600 DVD player because it staterd having problems reading SACD.The 81 was a cheap replacement until I get the Marantz fixed, I thought.
The Oppo 81 s far superior in picture quality, can tell no difference on SACD or DVD A.
The Marantz will be fixed and set aside as a back up now.
I will for-go HDMI until which time the 990 has problems.I've had it over 4 years and not any problems what so ever.
Thanks for your help.

Just out of curiosity - how do you have the 981HD video output connected? Your display has no HDMI input and the 981HD has no component output.

I have an Oppo 980 and am very pleased with the sound and picture quality, but have found it to be far less robust than my Pioneer Elite or Sony players when dealing with anything less than perfect disc. The Oppo probably stops at some point on 2 out of every 3 disc that I play on it, while the other players just wade on through taking small imperfections in stride.
Is this typical of Oppo players, or do I have a dud ?

That's pretty unusual, actually. The only OPPO player I haven't ever used is the 970HD, and I've spent quite a bit of time with all of their other units. In that time, I've only had one or two discs exhibit playback problems. Those were all recently, and it was because they had been excessively handled by a four-year-old (very dirty, plus some scratches in one case). You might run that issue past OPPO's customer support.

My 981HD seems to play anything. If a DVD refuses to play well in a different machine, it will play in the 981. I have borrowed DVD's from the public library that were very badly scratched and they usually do play on the 981. Sometimes the disk will freeze and the player seems to fight doing re-reads till it gets it and the disk suddenly will start playing again. I hope their new BD machine will be this robust.

Sounds like I've got a lemon. I'll contact Oppo.
Thanks for the input.

I've not owned a Sony disk player, but I do have 10 years of experience with Pioneer Elite. They will play disks with errors that do lock up other brands, though I also can't count Oppo as one of those. So far I've had no issues with the few disks I've played in my BDP-83 in the short time I've had it. It's been flawless.

I had the Pioneer Elite player when I was a QA Engineer at Zenith. This was considered a "high-end" player to my Zenith colleagues, and I was asked to play comparison disks on my Elite machine. Whenever we received notice of an issue with some disk or the other, we'd buy one (or a few) and I'd have the task to try the problem disk in my Pioneer Elite. It's rare for any disk to lock up the Elite, although a few rented disks over the years have choked it, though in most cases it would stutter through the problem area and continue normally past it. One looked like it had hardened PB&J smeared over it and others had really nasty scratches. Some disks can have manufacturing flaws. A memorable one was a Yanni CD that a Zenith customer reported. It was reported to lock up in track 2. After testing several we purchased locally and not finding an issue, we tested the one I had in my personal collection. It locked up the Zenith player, although I'd never noticed any issue with it in my Elite players (I also have Elite CD jukeboxes). We sent that disk to Korea for the LG engineers to analyze (they discovered the flaw and were able to add error correction for it to the LG/Zenith player's firmware). Appears the disk manufacturer had also discovered the flaw and fixed it, because those we purchased some time after the original release didn't have the flaw. We exchanged another of our good disks with the customer so we had a bad copy to test with.

Bill