Oppo Pandora Firmware Upgrade for BDP-93/BDP-95 Blu-ray Players

There are few A/V products these days that I really get excited about. When Oppo released the BDP-95, I was pretty eager to get my hands on one. As you can see, the player performed flawlessly in our bench tests. It did everything the venerable BDP-83SE did but added more features such as 3D support, better analog bass management and the ability to support more streaming services such as Netflix, Blockbuster, Youtube and now Pandora.

As an avid Pandora user, I’ve been waiting for this upgrade for some time. Until a couple of weeks ago, the only way I was able to stream Pandora into the Audioholics Showcase Home Family room system was through my iPod docking station plugged into my Yamaha RX-Z7 A/V receiver. While this was certainly an acceptable solution, it wasn’t very “audiophile” since I had to rely on additional compromising factors due to wirelessly streaming the Pandora services to my iTouch combined with the digital to analog conversion of the mediocre Apple DAC’s. The Yamaha docking station only sends analog audio signals to the A/V receiver which is a deficiency we hope Yamaha improves upon in future iterations.

A couple of weeks ago I received a firmware upgrade notice when I powered up my BDP-95, so I accepted the update not really knowing what it would be. Oppo is always updating the firmware on their products to tweak performance and compatibility with new Blu-ray releases. To date I have not had one unplayable Blu-ray disc on my BDP-95. I wish I could say the same for my very expensive Denon reference DVD-A1UDCI Blu-ray player but that’s worthy of an article unto itself.

After the firmware update was completed, I went to the Oppo homepage screen by clicking the “home” button on the remote and noticed the Pandora logo. Joygasm! I finally had my Pandora source and could digitally stream to the fabulous DAC’s of my Yamaha A/V receiver. Within minutes I was logged into my account and enjoying my favorite bands at near CD sound quality. For those contemplating on purchasing a Pandora membership, it’s well worth it in my opinion as it eliminates all commercials.  Sadly however, I recently discovered that Pandora only upgrades the sound quality from 128kbps 44kHz/16 bit to 160kbps when streaming to a computer, not a device like a blu-ray player or iPhone.  Despite that limitation, the 128kbps stream is still pretty darn good audio quality, especially when engaging in a post processing mode on your A/V receiver such as Prologic IIx Music Mode or other enhancer modes your receiver offers.

Pandora Screen from Oppo BDP-95

Oppo did a nice job with the Pandora screen layout. Your stations are all listed in the left column with the one you are listening to highlighted in yellow. Track history is listed on the far right column. The album artwork image is centered towards the top of the screen with the playtime bar, artists and track listing below. Here you can see me listening to Spock’s Beard which is a very cool progressive rock band based out of LA formed in the early 90s and going stronger than ever.

Oppo BDP-95 Pandora Menu Options

Menu options include bookmarking an artist, deleting/adding a station, switching the user account and pretty much all of the standard features you would find if you were using Pandora through an Internet browser. About the only missing feature, which I found a bit disappointing, was the ability to select what bands get played in the “QuickMix”. I love using this feature to randomize the music played by all of my favorite bands. My wife created many of her latino stations on my account. While I enjoy her music too, I’m not always in the mindset of mixing Emerson Lake and Palmer with Mark Anthony. Luckily enough, Oppo makes it real easy to skip songs you don’t want to hear by simply using the chapter skip button on the remote. The cool thing about this is that you don’t need to have your display on to do this. Realize however that Pandora treats “QuickMix” as a station so you have a fixed amount of skips per hour.

Configuration Notes

I pressed the signal info button on my Yamaha remote to confirm I was digitally connected via HDMI and it displayed PCM as I anticipated. I also took advantage of the excellent analog outputs of my BDP-95 by connecting it up to a second zone which happens to be my workout room. Pandora sounds a lot better now overlayed in PLIIx Music Mode when digitally connected to my Yammie receiver. The bass is deeper and more pronounced and everything just sounds cleaner overall.

We are happy to see that Oppo is vigorously supporting their products with routine firmware upgrades. Pandora support is icing on the cake for us. Over the last six months or so, I’m happy to report all of the hours of problem free entertainment the BDP-95 has provided. I still prefer using the other streaming services such as Youtube through my FIOS box as it seems to be more responsive than the Oppo, but maybe that will improve over time via firmware updates. We look forward to seeing what else Oppo has in store for future upgrades. In the meantime, we’re loving it as is!