Bad news for OPPO fans. The company officially announced that after 14 years, they will be gracefully exiting the US market. No new products will be developed or released, but support, repairs and warranty service will continue for existing products. Perhaps this may explain why some of their products were hard to find. Firmware updates will also continue to come out as needed.
Oppo’s official twitter account confirmed that headphones too are part of the end of development…
Our end to manufacturing new products includes our headphone products.
— OPPO Digital (@OPPODIGITAL) April 2, 2018
Oppo Digital USA was a US company, based in the Silicon Valley, making A/V products. They did not carry any of the many Oppo smartphones. Their Xiaomi friends are just barely in the US market on that front. This is total crackpot but maybe they want Xiaomi to become their official US brand instead?
According to the FAQ posted further down on their “Farewell post”, anyone who purchased a product directly from their website the last 30 days can return it for a full refund.
There is a bit of a “mic drop” feel to their farewell, as they are exiting while their products are very well-regarded by A/V enthusiasts
REACTIONS TO THE ANNOUNCEMENT
The Audiophiliac himself, Steven Guttenberg published a four minute video discussing this development on his YouTube channel…
The news did not quite make Techmeme, but it made it to some of the major technology blogs like Engadget and Le Verge.
On the forums front, there is a short discussion at Head-Fi (finding things there is not easy), along with a looong thread at reddit and a short thread.
Two threads are also running at the Super Bestest Audio Friends forum, the longest one under the DAC/amps sub-forum with a short one in the General sub-forum.
Something is not important unless it has duplicate threads!
Farewell!
So it is farewell to among other things their well-liked and hard to find PM-3 Planar Magnetic headphone which came out 1.5 years ago…
Their products, for the time being, continue to be sold from their own store and other marketplaces they sold through, eg Amazon.