in the april 2010 stereophile john atkinson attempts to minimize the trend of high end companies grabbing parts from street products and rebranding them.  i dont care if you take even one part from an oppo and then put all the rest of the thing together with your own parts, thats bs. 

i remember not that long ago that atleast these very same high end companies would use perhaps the premium philips METAL cd transport and then put their stuff surrounding it and sell it as their own.  well, thats ok as atleast they bought the premium transport direct from philips, just as they bought the dacs and chips from other specialized vendors.

now, they simply buy a container load of oppos at wholesale prices (think 15% of what you pay for it) and "add" a few nit nats and box it up for enormous profits. 

anyway, atkinson all of a sudden recalls that several years ago he was informed that there were royalty fees involved with licensing some technologies and that they could run in the four digits......ohhh..my.....dear o dear......and these high enders sell their oppos for $5K-15K  and more!  hell, just a few sales and a license would be paid for but then you would have to put in good components instead of dinking around and trying to figure out how to retain as much of the oppo you paid $30 dollars for and you would actually have to know something about "new" technology thats been around in the case of cd for 30+ years!

so atkinson is telling us "WHY" the high end has to stuff their boxes with oppos.  what a laugh. 

here we see the example of the mouth of the highend explaining why its OK to stuff an oppo in the box....i will give him credit he did HAVE to mention after it was all over the internet that he does "expect" high end companies to do more than slap a nice box around the oppo. 

thats the same oppo that the audio press went mad about in their previous reviews when they did not know it was an oppo.

one has to laugh.  but of course my favorite quote from the whole article was"i bought a pioneer sacd player that uses the same transport and motherboard as the the ayre c-5xe, and it sounded and measured worse than the ayre in every way"    sounded and measured worse.  what?  sound and measurements correlate....only when you need to boost up your high end advertisers i guess!  historically, its been sort of the other way...    the high end unit sounds better but measures worse!  and what pioneer sacd player did he buy anyway.  one made 10 years ago with all the electrolytic capacitors drying up etc.  and should not he say an ayre that uses a pioneer sacd....

how unfair. 

did i say unfair?  time to quit blabbing and get some sleep.

by the way, i have owned an oppo cd player for a long time and it is one cheaply put together unit, and i did get what i paid for, so no complaints about that and the high end reviewers have lauded the things sound so aint i the ever so lucky one to have such a "recommeded" component! 
t melex