Outboard video processing

I am doubtful but you are correct I have not heard the 105D. Just heard a similar argument a million times that a “head phone pre-amp” is better than an AVR etc. I know the 105D is not a headphone preamp.

Either way you stuck on 24p 1080 and 4k. So that is a down side regardless of the perceived “higher quality” sound.

I have heard £1500 AVR and £250 AVR and they don’t sound different. There is just more features and IO on a more expensive AVR.

Sure if you spend a lot more like £4000 you start getting higher quality DAC and components.

I’ve got a middle of the road Denon receiver which makes my speakers sound like someone beat them with a tubesock full of wood screws. It’s now a gap filler in my my media rack.

And, yes, it was properly set up with multiple runs through the Audyssey process.

It would allow a 4k video to pass through I guess, but I don’t have a 4k TV in this system. It does have powerful internal amplifiers, but I’ve no use for them as I use much better quality external ones. It does have a bunch of extra digital and analog inputs - which are all unused since I have a single source. Hmmm, I’m struggling to see what it brings to the table beyond wretched audio. It does provide decoding for the various formats, so I get to see a glowing “DTS-HD” symbol… Huh. Kewl.

I don’t hate Denon. In point of fact I’ve had several really decent Denon components over the years, and I’m not an audio snob. I’ve played around with other manufacturers AVRs also and they didn’t all sound as bad as this one. But none of them sounded as good as the Oppo feeding my monoblock amps directly.

One day I’ll make some changes/updates. But given how nice the system performs now, that day may be well down the road.

Cheers,
Robert

I almost wish I was still like jack4r where I could be easily satisfied with just about anything. I really don’t understand what the point of this kind of debate on this forum is though. If someone has hardware that they want to use and they are happy with why would anyone else care. Why push someone to use different hardware when what they already have works for their purpose and they are happy with it.

He is clearing trying to use a bluray player as an AV receiver. Which is exactly why i suggest buying an AV Receiver. There are many other benefits to an AVR outside of the just the bitstreaming, as you probably already know.

The guy sounded like he was missing and AVR in his life. I didn’t say oppo bluray player was useless and i did say if he has it then use it. In fact to answer the op question directly, if you have external speakers connected to your oppo or headphones (if it supports that) you will certainly benefit from running your vero through you oppo. If you still listen to the audio on your TV you are not going to benefit much as you are still relying on the same Speakers and the vero as a source medium will adequately pass the audio through to your TV directly. In fact to test you should run it directly and then through your oppo and report if you notice any difference.

The benefits to upscaling and audio post processing especially when you are trying to bitstream are negligible at best.

Too truly answer you question you will have to tell us, what type of music/films/tv you listen to (what is the source) and what is your speaker configuration.

To your ears, perhaps; but not necessarily to everyone else’s. And it depends very much on the quality of other components in the chain, like speakers, and external power amps (if they’re being used).

Think of it as being like wine. I don’t care for wine that much and, to me, one glass of red wine generally tastes like much any other. But someone with a better developed sense of taste and smell than I have can easily taste the difference between a £50 bottle and a £15 bottle. The fact that I can’t tell the difference doesn’t mean that no one else can.

Actually it does have a built-in headphone amp. It’s not amazingly good, but better than the average TV headphone socket.

No, he isn’t. Not if he adds an HDFury AVRKey or similar device.

The difference between a £4000 receiver and a £2000 one is more likely to be in the power amp stage than in the processing and DACs.

@Phydeaux, you probably already spotted this, but in case you didn’t, the July release of OSMC has a new option for Settings->Player->Videos->“Display 4:3 videos as”. The new option is called “Use HDMI AVI signalling”. If you select that option, then the Vero can now output 480p or 576p video unscaled, with the correct aspect ratio, correctly signalled, under all circumstances.

This means you can whitelist 480p and 576p on the Vero, and set your Oppo aspect ratio to “16:9 Wide / Auto” and you’ll now get optimal image quality for all SD video.

In the current release there is one mild side-effect to doing this, which is that HD videos with a 4:3 aspect ratio (e.g. blu ray upscales of old 4:3 TV shows) may have slightly-less-than-optimal picture quality; but I expect that to be fixed in the next release, and HD/4:3 is quite rare anyway.

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Actually I do read the release notes but this didn’t click in my head. Thanks for pointing this out, it looks like a step in the right direction.

Cheers,
Robert