The DMP experience

I already deleted your duplicate account.

Just to clarify. No sell on what you have? Or, no buy on what comes after it?

Doubt if PSA ordered several thousand drives unless they expect every 2nd unit to fail in the mid-term. Paul has stated that product failure rate is around 1% (not sure if that is across all the product range or specially the DMP) so even if you were pessimistic and said 10% or 20% of products manufactured should keep the replacement stock adequate.

I don’t know if someone here is involved in photography (I am professionally)? If yes, you might remember the problems Nikon had with their D-800 and D-600 cameras?

The 800 was a revolutionary product indeed: superb sensor at the highest available resolution in the full frame sector at that time. Sold very well, couple of months later they introduced the even better D-800E. But both had an inferior focusing system that made the benefits of the high resolution useless, the AF would miss all too often, high resolution images useless. The successor D-810 was much better, just as the previous model should have been in the first place. I was forced to replace my 800E with that because it was simply not usable for the kind of work I did, even after Nikon tried to fix it three times in one year (because they couldn’t fix the inherent design flaw). We see already a similarity to the case we have here with the DMP?

“He might have also added, not just sound better, but works better”.

Now for the D-600, wich was plagued with oil spots that kept been sprayed from the mirror mechanism onto the sensor so that people had spots on their images. Nikon’s marketing department had indeed the nerve to advertise the successor, the D-610 with the slogan “I am spotfree!” So don’t be surprised if PS Audio does a similar thing :grin:

I have a degree in communications design, so I know quite a bit about psychology and demagogy.

So, what did Nikon do? In case of the D-800 they released a fantastic product that had no competition at the time - but with severe design flaws built in. Then they made their dissatisfied customers happy again by selling them another camera at even a slightly higher prise as the first one. It worked! In a time of extreme consumerism and (calculated) obsolescense at lightspeed and millions of people eager to pay insane prices for things like a smartphone, anything goes.

One may argue that a high performance audio device at a mere 6.5 k is a bargain anyway and not much different than a smartphone and that if you don’t have money to burn, you should simply not go gambling in the audiophile casino… if you do it anyway and loose, go cry somewhere else about your lost peanuts, because this is big boy territory :money_mouth_face:

I really hope there a couple of sensible people left who feel differently and want something lasting for their money, no matter how easy they earn it. Mine is earned damn hard, but unfortunately… I’m a hopeless music junkie :expressionless: And at my age, what I buy now to listen to my disc collection until my ears give up indeed has to be “the last optical disc player you will ever need”…

17

1 Like

I should have said a no sale for me meaning the next transport. I am not looking to replace my DMP with a less capable CD only player. I am too far beyond that. Some people talk as if this equipment is low cost. By my standards it is not. The fact that some manufacturers dare to put $40,000 to $100000 price tags on their offerings they have no appeal to me. Even if I had the money to afford them I could not justify the outrageous price tags. $12,000 list for a DAC Transport Combination is my limit stretched to it’s max. I get allot of satisfaction knowing that my system sounds as good or better than some of these over priced units. When I see images of the build quality in some of those units they don’t even look like something I would buy for less than what I have paid for my DMP and Direcstream DAC. High End Audio pricing has become way out of hand!

Paul said they have sold several thousand DMP. The obvious conclusion is they bought several thousand optical drives from OPPO to build those DMP. Unless I’m missing something?

Would a business purchase a back-up drive for every unit manufactured? Given a reported failure rate of 1% it seems like gross over investment. PSA is a different company though. Only Paul knows how many they purchased.

Sorry @Brodric - I now see I misread your comment to be about the volume of drives PSA purchased when Oppo advised they were getting out of the audio/video transport product line.
I expect that initially PSA never ordered the several thousand drives upfront, probably had them delivered in batches as the DMP was being manufactured and sold.

I wasn’t talking in the context of their reserved spares holding. I simply made the point it must have been a big outlay to buy all the available (thousands) optical drives from OPPO (he said they bought every one they could get).

From what I understand, the optical drive in the DMP is the same optical drive MSB use in their $24,500 Select Transport. MSB can get their hardware/software to work with the OPPO bits. So it can be done. Paul has said they will do it (and you’ll be saving yourself $18,500).

1 Like

The physical OPPO produced drive units have been among the most trouble free in the industry since they were first introduced years ago and have been used as the basis for units from “High End” audio companies costing many times that of the DMP so I don’t think PSA bought based on anywhere near a one on one replacement expectation. I have owned OPPO players since the 970 and have never had one even act like it wouldn’t load or play. The issues with the DMP seem to be based on the two software “ecosystems” not communicating with each other as anticipated with the problem being complicated by a lazy programmer. If Paul and his current staff come to the conclusion that they will never be able to make them work as anticipated they don’t have much choice other than to move on at some point. OPPO’s people finally relenting and releasing access to the needed code would be another more favorable outcome. The other options for drive units of that level are currently not available for sale that I am aware of since Teac got out of the OEM drive business.

Don’t suspect there are enough of those $24,500 units in the wild long enough to come to that conclusion. Why don’t you see if you can talk Mike at AS to run his store sample though all of the paces MSB claims for the unit and report back.

I have hands-on time with the MSB, it seemed pretty solid to me. We also have a PS Community member here who owns the MSB and he said the same thing (both were the $40k optioned up MSB Transports). I’m certainly not going to blow $40K on a MSB when Paul has promised the $6K DMP will be as good (or better).

I think that was the opinion of the DMP initially plus MSB management had the advantage of seeing how the OPPO people had handled the PSA situation going into their negotiations with them. If they knew that OPPO was planning their exit from the industry they also had that leverage with both the code access and back-up drives. As they will never even come close to selling as many units as the DMP has sold already they wouldn’t have needed that many backups to start with. For all the talk about their “top-line” DACS and Transports after their R&D, casework and advertising costs I doubt they do much more than break even on those pieces if that. They are to generate interest in the rest of the line.

From what I understand, MSB were also blind-sided by the OPPO decision.

If they were they do pay attention and have dealers that carry both lines so they had to be aware of the “code access” issues so they could address them and prevent what has happened with the DMP. Had the product development for the two companies happened in reverse the results might have been reversed to.

All this makes a compelling reason to buy stuff from a manufacturer that builds the whole shooting match (if such a manufacturer exists?). PS Audio obviously doesn’t have the chops to build optical drives, it’s unfortunate they could not get access to all the IP they needed to fully understand the inner workings of the OPPO bits they bought.

A prime example of your point exist with all the “firmware” issues the owners continue to have with every McIntosh product that involves any vestige of digital components or software control yet “the faithful worshipers of the Blue Meters” continue to buy only to be plagued by 8-12 month repair times and dealers who don’t even know how to set the gear up. McIntosh has no part in the development of the software based parts of their gear so no idea how to fix it.

1 Like

If you think that’s bad, Krell repair times had been running over a year for some products.

“$24,500 MSB Transport:”

$16.500 power base that is big money for something that doesn’t even look - to my eyes - aesthetically like a piece of HiFi, it looks like a Wi-Fi Router. Each to his own. Personally I don’t like the radiused corners but as the saying goes beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I take it you have listened to MSB equipment and if so, do they justify such hefty price tags ?