In the current landscape of Class D advancements and digital room correction, the purely analog Opus 2010 Mega remains a benchmark. Modern DACs like the dCS Vivaldi or MSB Select DAC have analog outputs that require pristine voltage amplification. The Mega provides that without compromise.
However, there are practical caveats:
To understand the Opus 2010 Mega, you must first understand the market of 2009-2011. This was the transition period between physical media (CD/DVD/Blu-ray) and digital downloads. High-resolution audio was becoming accessible, but hardware was lagging. The standard "Opus" line was known for its clinical accuracy. The "Mega" suffix, however, signified a total departure from restraint.
The "Mega" denoted three specific hardware upgrades over the standard Opus 2010 model: Opus 2010 Mega
The goal was simple: eliminate every bottleneck between the digital file and your ears.
Ask any owner of the Opus 2010 Mega about its sonic signature, and they will universally cite the "black background." This refers to the near-infinite signal-to-noise ratio. On a standard preamp, you might hear a faint hiss when placing your ear next to the tweeter. On the Mega, with the volume at maximum and no music playing, the tweeter is utterly silent.
When music plays, the effect is transformative: In the current landscape of Class D advancements
One of the flagship features was what the marketing team called the "Jitter Holocaust." The Opus 2010 Mega utilized a ±0.5ppm temperature-compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO). At the time, most consumer DACs used clocks with 50ppm accuracy. This low-jitter design meant that regardless of whether you were feeding it a clean USB signal or a noisy coaxial S/PDIF from a budget DVD player, the soundstage remained locked in place.
Strangely, for a device marketed as a "digital hub," the Opus 2010 Mega included a fully discrete MM/MC phono preamp. This was unusual. Most DACs ignored vinyl entirely. The Mega didn't just include it as a pass-through; it offered variable capacitive loading from 100pF to 400pF. This made the unit a darling among "hybrid" listeners who wanted to rip their vinyl to high-resolution FLAC via the optical output.
There is a specific type of audiophile known as a "residualist"—someone who believes that engineering peaked between 2005 and 2012, before the race to the bottom on price. For that person, the Opus 2010 Mega is still the endgame. The goal was simple: eliminate every bottleneck between
It represents a time when manufacturers did not care about power consumption, size, or cost. They cared about signal integrity. The Mega is heavy, hot (the chassis runs at ~105°F), and infuriatingly limited by modern standards. But when you plug it in, feed it a lossless 44.1kHz file (it prefers Red Book CD quality over high-res DSD), and listen through a pair of Audeze LCD-2s or vintage Klipsch Heresys... the music breathes.
It is not the cleanest DAC ever made. It is not the most detailed. But it has body. It has slam. It has the indescribable "X-factor" that modern, measurement-obsessed designs often lack.
While the standard Opus 2010 used dual Burr-Brown PCM1798 chips, the Mega version stepped up to the legendary PCM1794A chips in dual-mono configuration. This meant discrete decoding for the left and right channels, offering a theoretical dynamic range of 127dB. In real-world terms, this eliminated crosstalk. When you listened to a binaural recording on the Mega, the separation felt surgical—a quality that modern all-in-one USB DACs still struggle to emulate without costing thousands.