It's hard to say. The BDP-95 was one of the first products (if not the first) to offer the ES9018. Design of the analog section for the Model 978 might actually pre-date design of the analog section design for the BDP-95, or at least be from the same general time. OPPO Digital also had an existing working relationship with ESS because of the BDP-83SE, which could have made it more practical to push some boundaries and be one of the first to design around the newer chip. For those reasons, it's possible that Outlaw ended up working around a previous ESS Sabre32 chip like the ES9006 (which is the same chip used in the BDP-83SE's eight-channel analog output) or ES9016 (the chip used in the BDP-83SE's stereo analog output). Frankly, I'd be tickled to have either the ES9018, ES9016, or ES9006 in a surround processor. Having heard both, the differences are subtle, even when the ES9018 is given the advantage of an even more robust and aggressive analog board design.