Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Sony Blu-Ray Player...

So, that's great that the PS3 will decode the new formats and send them LPCM to a "older" receiver that cannot decode those formats.. but what if the receiver only has coax or toslink inputs ? and NO HDMI ? can I still have the new HD Sound format, decoded by the PS3 and sent LPCM via toslink or coax ? My pre-amp is pretty darn good, Anthem AVM-20, but it predates HDMI.

No such luck, Riker. It wants HDMI.

Storage size depends upon your intended usage. You can now download movies and TV shows directly to your PS3 for viewing. You can load your own movies, MP3s and photos on a PS3 as well. There are downloadable games that don't require you to go out and buy a disk, just pay online.

However, if you need extra room it is super easy to plug in an external hard drive right into one of it's USB ports for an extra 500GB or more. The internal drive has also been designed so it's easily replaceable.

So short answer = pay more attention to the features of the differnt size models so that you get all the features you want. Size can easily be added later.

This wiki page shows the big difference in features between all the models. Size refers as much to feature set as it does storage space.

PS3 model comparison
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Ooooh. Just read the chart closer in the link I sent you. They are starting to strip a lot of features out of the new, 80GB models. No more SACD, flash card reader, or PS2 compatibility.

If you want SACD, now is the time to hunt down the last of the older models.

Wait, there's a new 80 GB model, different from the old 80 GB model, with fewer features?

Can the older PS3's be upgraded to the newest firmware like blueray 2.0?

Yes.

That chart may be misleading as the Metal Gear 80gb bundle I recently bought comes with SACD capability, card reader and other...

Perhaps. A Google revealed a lot of web board and blog posts complaining about removed features on the 80GB, especially the lack of PS2 game support. Perhaps you got lucky and bought old stock. After all, we are not far into August.

Hopefully, the data was wrong and they are still shipping the same box.

A side note on players that are sending the new format as a bitstream is that they can't use some Bluray Profile 1.1/2.0 features like extra audio commentary during the movie, because it has to be mixed in with the original soundtrack in the player. More info on this can be found elsewhere.
To use these features one would have to do the decoding in the player and send decoded/mixed audio as LPCM.

Something I would like to know is if any Axiom owner with a 3808 and a player that does both has done a comparison.
The capability to decode the new formats in the reciver mostly look like a sales thing more than to be actually useful at this point unless there is a difference in AQ?