My comments apply to basically any SACD or DVD-Audio player, not just the OPPO players.


There are a lot of ways to get high resolution audio content. SACD and DVD-Audio have both been around for something like 10 years now, so there's a decent amount of content available in those catalogs. Many people have libraries they started building 10 years ago, and SACD in particular still sees new releases. Other options that exist include Blu-ray (which so far has mostly seen concert music releases, although there have been some studio albums released on BD) and lossless audio files from several online services.


Licensing is a problem for stereo digital output of SACD over optical and coaxial. Bandwidth is a problem for multichannel lossless audio of any sort. Put simply, optical and coaxial won't handle more than two channels of lossless audio. If you are listening to a Blu-ray Disc via optical or coaxial output and it has a lossless multichannel audio track, you are going to get one of two things: stereo only (downmixed from the multichannel track), or a lossy Dolby Digital or DTS multichannel track (either a "core" track embedded in the original or something that the player is encoding on the fly).

At this point, HDMI can be used with any available format. It's been that way for several years. HDMI v1.3 supports bitstream output of TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. Starting with HDMI v1.2, SACD's native DSD format could be passed over HDMI. Even before then, HDMI had licensing issues with Sony resolved and Sony felt that HDMI was secure enough to output SACD over HDMI. Going all the way back to HDMI v1.1, you could output multichannel LPCM over HDMI. That can work for any formats (SACD's DSD, DVD-Audio's MLP, Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio, or raw multichannel PCM) as long as the player converts to PCM first.