AFIAK company and service for the devices continues for a couple of years.
They only do not sell BR players anymore.
This might be due to the fact that most people only stream films.
When I told this info about Oppo to a friend, he simply said, he is not interested in buying BR anymore, he only streams.
Maybe like many people nowadays listen to MP3 and not lossless ...
The interesting part of the 205 is, that he has a high end D/A converter which is very expensive.
If you intend to playback i.e. SACD, then for copyright reasons the sound won't be played through optical SPDIF.
Then you really need a good D/A converter built into the system.
This was a very big disappointment for me finding out, that I can not perform the D/A conversion for SACDs using OPPO via optical SPDIF via RME ADI-2 Pro. Since then SACD is dead for me. Nice idea, but bullshit implementation killing every possibility to let the customer decide, where the D/A conversion shall happen.
If I would have known that upfront, maybe I even would have spend the money for the 205.
On the other hand .. dunno whether the difference is that high.
RME gets the most out of the AKM chip and the sound is phantastic, even slightly better compared to Accuphase DAC-40 module, which I thinik is really good.
But .. I would get at least an Oppo, because it has great features
- operation is very fast, including loading of a medium until playback
- better options to adjust / resynchronize tone to video. My old player was only able to add time for music playback. It turned out for me that I need a negative adjustment of approx -50ms, which my old player didnt support. With the Oppo all this is possible
In terms of clients for netflix ... yes nice to have BUT .. I don't see it necessarily the task of a BR player.
I would rather than that prefer, that the vendor concentrates on the basic job of such a device to make it perfect.
For Netflix I use the old Amazon Stick without Alexa, fully satisfactory. Or if you have it build into TV.
Whats also nice with the Oppo. It has an andriod App.
I have all my 5-star rated music as lossless FLAC on my smartphone.
If I want I can perform the playback of lossless files via Wireless and the Oppo displays the covers etc ...
Nice option if you sit on your sofa and want to select what you want to listen to.
Similar functionality can be achieved with MusicBee and MusicBee Remote on an android phone.
I would at least get the Oppo 203. It works really phantastic. I spend the additional money to get it region free.
BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13