Some subtle points that may help clarify or muddy things up:
*You can apply bass management and DSP processing to multichannel PCM over HDMI if your receiver/processor allows this processing. This is the preferred way for bm/processing since the signal remains in the digital domain.
*It actually does seem to matter for DTS-HD High Resoulution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio where the decoding takes place. Firstly, none of the HD-DVD players from Toshiba can decode the full DTS-HD High Res or DTS-HD Master Audio; they can only decode the embedded "core" DTS bitstream . By sending undecoded bitstream to a processor/receiver that can then decode the full codec, you can enjoy the full capacity of DTS-High Res and DTS-Master Audio. In this regard, as the only bitstream-capable player, the HD-A35 would be superior. For DD+ and Dolby True HD, it shouldn't matter whether the player or the processor/receiver is doing the decoding since the full codec is utlized (sent as bitstream or decoded into PCM). By the way, for DTS-HD Master Audio, one needs HDMI 1.3 on either end for bitstream capability, whereas lower HDMI suffices for bitstream of other codecs. An interesting twist is that the discs may have extraneous video/PIP, audio, or text overlays that the players (? second decoder) can decode and mix with the main PCM , but it is not clear if this extra information can be sent as bitstream and decoded separately in the processor/receiver. In addition, players can only decode 5.1 channels so far. If we get 6.1 and 7.1 channels on the disc, using bitstream may be necessary to enjoy all the channels unless a firmware update to the players allows decoding of more than 5.1 channels into PCM.
John
