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With all the talk of Full High Definition televisions, it makes sense to mention the source of all that 1080p goodness. At the seminar Panasonic announced an update for its DMP-BD10 Blu-ray disc player. It’s called the, wait for it, DMP-BD10A. In case you missed it, there’s now an A on the end of the name. In fact, that simple letter is worth quite a bit as the player now has support for the new audio codecs that Blu-ray supports – that’s Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS HD High Resolution Audio. All of these offer 7.1 surround sound, while the latter two are lossless. The good news for those who’ve already forked out for a DMP-BD10 is that Panasonic plans to make a firmware update available giving access to the new formats.

One thing that the updated player won’t offer is an Ethernet port, so if and when BD Interactive Live discs arrive you won’t be able to access that content with this player. I asked Panasonic’s Michael Friedrich why Panny couldn’t have just stuck a standard Ethernet port in there and firmware flashed the player when Live discs appear, as it is doing with the audio formats. The answer is that the exact form that Live discs will take isn’t known and it doesn’t want to claim compatibility now only to find out that it has a problem when the discs do become available. Quite sensible I suppose, and one has to ask wonder if anyone will really care about the interactive material.

Along with the Blu-ray drive, Friedlich also took an opportunity to demo the Viera Link feature. This enables you to control all your AV equipment with the one remote, with the caveat being that you need to have everything Panasonic.

However, Panny does indeed offer everything you need, including amp and speakers. The SB-TP1000 speakers are four tall, slim-line set that will match your flat speakers perfectly. Yes, I did say four. Panasonic has dispensed with a dedicated centre speaker by integrating speakers into the front two designed for dialogue – it’s called Twin Centre.

We were actually given a demo of this using 7.1 audio and actually the experience was mixed – quite literally. The first demo was of a rather overdone opera singer miming badly to an operatic version of Bryan Adams, ‘Everything I Do’, which is as bizarre as it sounds. While there was no doubt denying the power and beauty in the voice and the recording, it didn’t really work as a convincing surround demo. I was sitting right by the rear right speakers and that was pretty much all I could here. However, with a well mixed clip of The Day After Tomorrow, the Twin Centre demo was much more effective.

Friedlich also announced that Panasonic was the only one offering HDMI 1.3a cables of up to 10 metres in length. HDMI normally experiences signal loss over five metres, but these new cables feature built in equalizers to keep the signal pure. These new cables could be pretty useful is you’re planning a home cinema.

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