Last week I received my Oppo BD-83 which I have connected directly via HDMI to my LG television and via digital coax and analog cable to my 1070. In going through the setup of the BD player, one option is the LPCM Rate limit. The default is 48K with options of 96K and 192K. I couldn't find a reference to the rate in the 1070 owners manual (although I may have missed it). What do you suggest?

The LPCM rate limit on the BDP-83 is going to rarely be a factor. I don't know what the highest supported rate is for the 1070 (it's probably either 48kHz or 96kHz), but you'll rarely encounter a disc that offers higher than 48kHz via coaxial output anyway.

I've had problems sending 192kHz from my PC's sound card to the 1070 but no issues with 96kHz. Not sure if it's the sound card or 1070 but I just leave it at 96kHz (which I think is upsampled from the original source anyway).

-John

I think I set the BDP-83 at 192K and have had no problems with my 1070 handling the audio via coax for CDs. I use analog for BD, DVD and SACD.

Bob

The BDP-83 does not upsample - the setting is only used to determine the highest supported rate, so it can downsample sources that would exceed what the receiver or processor can handle. CD's are 44.1kHz, so no matter what setting is used they will output as such.

Gonk, this isn't really the right place for a BDP-83 question, but it is related to your last answer. Do you know what the BDP-83 sends out the toslink/coax from an HDCD when it is set to bitstream? Is it just the regular CD 44.1kHz/16bit version, or is it some 20/24 bit HDCD bitstream?

This subject came up during the EAP, but I have maybe one or two HDCD's in my entire music library so I didn't follow it real closely. At the time, the HDMI output was getting a decoded PCM signal (not an HDCD bitstream) and it was confusing the HDCD decoder in a couple of Denon receivers. I think the coaxial and optical outputs may have been affected similarly. I'm not sure what the production firmware is doing currently, but the plan is for the player to output an undecoded HDCD bitstream when the digital output is set to "bitstream" and the output a decoded PCM signal (using the player's built-in HDCD decoder) when digital output is set to LPCM. If this is not enabled in production firmware currently, I would expect it to appear some time in June.

Thanks. With the latest May 4 firmware, the BDP-83 recognizes the one HDCD I know I have. When set to bitstream, digital coax gets something that the Outlaw 990 deals with reasonably. The 990 does not have an HDCD decoder, so it should just interpret undecoded HDCD bitstream as a standard 44.1kHz/16bit CD.

The alternatives will be whether the Oppo decoding HDCD through the stereo analog to the 990 in bypass is better than the Oppo decoding HDCD to LPCM (44.1kHz/24bit or whatever) and going digitally through the 990's DAC in stereo or upsample.

For a couple of HDCD's it may not be worth spending the time to figure out!

Here's what I'd suggest: try using the multichannel analog output (which I presume you've got hooked up anyway for TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, and multichannel PCM) with your HDCD and see what you think. In that scenario, the BDP-83 is decoding the HDCD internally rather than passing a bitstream to the 990 so the signal can be treated as a standard CD.

Yes, I'm doing all that and more. There is also the Oppo's enhanced stereo analog output that is supposed to be slightly better than multichannel. I have been using that mostly with the the 990 in BYPASS for CDs. The specs on the stereo DAC chip are actually slightly better than the multichannel chip.

I still use the 990 for full multichannel bass management, so everything goes through the 990's extra analog-to-digital-to-analog conversion. The stereo analog can be sent separately to BYPASS on the 990.

Slick! You might wait for the next firmware update and then re-visit the digital output of HDCD. In the meanwhile, the analog path should serve you well...