Jay, Stuart and myself conducted a brief A/B test of Jay's unit (a fully modded, fresh out of the box unit) with my partially modded (just the 4 x SPDIF) unit plugged into my G68J... we could definitely hear a difference in blind testing between the 2 units... however, the jury is still out on which sounded better... Jay and Stuart sometimes preferred my unit... I always preferred Jay's unit because I thought it sounded smoother... Jay and Stuart felt that it sometimes sounded more veiled. Of course, I've been living with my unit for a month now... I think it sounds a bit 'bright' at times compared to my 98DH... all of us agreed that the 98H sounded better than my Oppo. We felt that Jay's Oppo deserved a bit more burn-in time before we made the comparison to the 98DH. Jay and I are going to conduct 2 more experiments... Jay and I set up his HD621 and his Oppo (connected via HDMI to the HD621 and via the modded SPDIF ports directly to his 861)... he's enjoying that for a few days while the Oppo gets some run-in time. We're going to do an A/B test this week between the HDMI and the direct connect. We're then going to let another couple of weeks go by so that his ear can become accustomed to the sound of his Oppo. We will then swap players for a week to see which one we prefer 'living' with (as opposed to a bunch of switching back and forth trying to pick out what we like or dislike about the players).