[Flac] playback problems with oppo BDP-95

[Brian Willoughby]

My friend somehow managed to get a BDP-95, even though the hardware  
isn't scheduled to ship until March.  The problem is that the manual  
makes no mention of FLAC, at all, and only the web page claims to  
support the format.

Playback of flac seems to work, but files from one online vendor work  
flawlessly while files from other online vendors have strange  
glitches that sound like a chirp or some kind of cheesy sci-fi movie  
laser effect.  My hunch is that the flac files with problems were  
possibly compressed with --best or -8 and are just too much for the  
BDP-95 to keep up with.  Considering that the oppo BDP-95 supports  
192 kHz playback and surround, I would expect them to use a fast  
processor that can keep up with the demands of flac decoding.   
Perhaps these problems will be fixed in the future with a firmware  
upgrade - at least I hope it's not a situation where the processor is  
simply underpowered and no amount of firmware rewriting will work.

I tried to browse around the main flac site looking for information  
about hardware decoders, but I could not find any details.  Has  
anyone documented the levels of support for various pieces of  
hardware?  Actually, I see that the Squeezebox and Transporter are  
specifically documented as supporting flac compression levels 0  
through 8, which is great.  Is there similar documentation of other  
hardware platforms?  I guess the BDP-95 is too new to be on any such  
list anyway, but I was hoping to see more than three devices with  
these details.

If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.  I tried a couple of  
Google searches, as well as Bing, but that was probably redundant.   
Maybe I didn't use the right key words.

I'm suggesting that my friend uncompress to WAV and then recompress  
with flac --fast, but I'm wondering if there is an easy way to know  
that I higher level of compression would be guaranteed to work, even  
for 'slow' hardware decoders.

Brian Willoughby
Sound Consulting