Understanding High Definition Audio Comments

Many thanks Danny for your brief explaination.- It seems to me that the industry, on your evidence, could not organise the proverbial in a brewery. So much for PAP (protected audio path) and (sic!) which you skipped over, rightly so, as the acronym is perhaps most appropriate given the confusion... LOL

Knowing how long BR and (HD-DVD) have been about ( in development and out on sale) you would think that the product chain from studio to home cinema would have been sorted by now. The term Industry Standards, springs to mind; like where are they and is anyone following them?

With the confusion / marketing economy with truth, that confronts we simple punters, the obvious loss is, 1. revenue to the manufacturers and 2. mistrust at this end. Personally, I will stay with HTPC solutions until I think that player and receiver producers get their acts together. I have no desire to 'waste' my hard earned....

As a side note to your 'review', hows-about 'matrix grids' of player and amp/receiver capabilities as you get them for review. Avaialable as a seperate and growing list to high light what each can output /handle. I appreciate that you (TR)give the summary tables at the end of each individual review - I see some sites now do this for Ati and Nvidia graphics cards, as useful reference point it may be a valuable asset to TR as a web site to checkout.

Care to give any examples then, of your perfect lossless audio cinema setup? Is there a format you prefer? Is there an example of a Blu-ray disc that showcases its full potential? I personally would be interested in knowing what The Dark Knight sounds like through either DD THD or DTS HDMA, with its sound designer-like score.

One of the biggest problems was the fact the blu-ray spec wasn't finished either (hence these stupid profiles), plus they didn't force the manufactures to support a set of codecs either (more than likely because Sony's flagship PS3 couldn't decode the DTSHDMA).

As for differences in lossless formats, the first choice would be PCM, but not because of quality, but because the DTS and Dolby formats can have dynamic range compression information in the stream, which your amp/player might/might not be able to turn on/off. If it can't you end up with something other than the original sound.

It should also make no difference where the decoding of lossless is done, so it doesn't matter if the player is doing the decoding and not the amp.

Not many discs have all 3 formats on, in fact the only one I've got is Funny Games which does have a TrueHD and DTS-HDMA track, not much difference really...possibly the DTS is doing its long standing trick of boosting the bass a bit...but its not a great track to test with.

"could not organise the proverbial in a brewery." - Love it!
I can understand the unwillingness to move towards the acronym 'PAP', after all who wants a logo like that smeared all over the front of their products?

At the moment my Sony Blu-Ray proffers Dolby TrueHD and DTS master audio processed onboard sent via stereo RCA - so I have it hooked up to my hifi.
Irritating, because for now I have to choose between two channel hi-def sound or 5.1 dvd quality. Luckily my hifi has a good field of sound so it's mostly up to the task....

@GoldenGuy if you cared enough about home cinema to get a blu-ray player then you will love the jump in sound quality. On my set up (above ^) Dark Knight sounded amazing, especially the portions recorded on set w/ Imax equipment.

As for recommended amps, medium to high end onkyos are a safe bet for compatibility (6-series and above I believe) and they sound great (most get 5 star reviews from WHFS&V).
I just can't afford one :(

@cjb110 you're quite right mate, they were too worried about racing HD-DVD and now it's become an issue for us. It's difficult to make a compatible system these days without plenty of research/know-how - how many Joe Bloggs consumers do you think will bother or even be aware of the issue? Similar issues existed with video encoding (which has now thankfully caught up) where Sony just rushed too much and didn't have a good industry standard when Blu-ray first came out.

OK - this is getting really confusing now... I have a Denon 3805 receiver which I am not in a rush to replace (it's excellent - just doesn't have HDMI connections of any sort), but if I were to buy a BR player, my understanding was that to get HD sound, the BR player would have to have in-built Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD decoders and then to connect to the AV amp via the 5x phono connections (whilst using HDMI for the picture connection direct to a HD telly). Is that correct?

Good article although it would have been good to promote the actual benefits of high definition audio rather than just its complexities of use. People only think of high definition as 'better picture' but it's so much more.

en1gma > In answer to your question, I have the similar but lower spec. Denon 2805 and although I am awaiting a new HD Amp, you are correct in believing that you can still use your 3805 to get HD sound using 6 RCA/phono connectors from a BluRay player to your amplifier. The player would output the decoded Dolby TruHD or DTS HD Master as PCM and this will be sent to your 3805.

I am new here, I hope someone can help..
I have an Onkyo TX-SR 576 receiver and 5.1 speaker system, and I want to buy a BluRay player that will allow me to hear Dolby TrueHD / DTS-HD. Would the Panasonic DMP-BD35EB-K be a suitable player ???? as it seems to offer Dolby TrueHD /DTS-HD decoding.
I have read that the Onkyo 576 will "support these (Dolby True HD and DTS HD)codecs via LPCM over HDMI",
Very good article, but I am a bit lost as to the Onkyo 576's capabilities.