I currently have a 4.1 system. I am completely satisified with the localization and quality of soundtracks when sitting in the "sweetspot" using a phantom center.

I'm planning to upgrade to bluray and a reciever that supports the lossless audio formats. I have read some reports that the lossless tracks aren't handled well with a phantom center. The channel could be dropped or the whole mix downconverted into stereo.

Does anyone have any experience with this?

Do you mean that you read somewhere that some players or receivers, when decoding the new audio formats, have trouble re-distributing the center channel?

If so then I would say avoid these players; otherwise, I would be hard-pressed to find a difference between lossless formats and DD/DTS with regards to phantom centers. Either both would lose something or neither would.

Do you have a link to those reports (if they are online)?
I would be curious.
Thanks in advance,
E.F.

Here is a short thread on avs forum:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=873896

Quote from thread concerning phantom center:
"I will only caution that most players and AVR's will not allow this for Dolby TrueHD...."

I'm having a hard time finding definitive answers.

Another disturbing thing I have discovered in researching this is that most dolby digital tracks enable Dynamic Range Compression (DRC) in a 4.1 system. I'm thinking that is why I have always vastly preferred DTS over Dolby in my system.

If these limitations are true, it is incredibly frustrating. There are many situations where a phantom center can be a better choice. Placement of a center is frequently difficult and if the main speakers are of high quality (with great amplification) it can be expensive to match a center to this.

Of course you realize what the response will be to this statement on this forum... don't you?

What is your receiver?

I'm currently using a NAD T753. I'm planning to upgrade this when I go to bluray. I would love to find a receiver/processor that will do phantom center for TruHD and allow DRC to be disabled for dolby digital when no center is present. Until today I assumed almost all would do this.

I realize 4.1 systems are not that popular.

I would say, get a player to decode the signals and send them as LPCM over HDMI to a modern receiver. At that point, the center will be split properly over the L/R as the receiver will not know the source and the player will think you have a center channel.

I love that answer! Don't tell the player what's connected and the receiver can't tell what's coming in. By keeping them both in the dark they can't screw you! Take that, overbearing corporate engineering scumbags!

I think that is what I'm going to do.

The PS3 appears to do the decode so I'm leaning toward that. Plus it has a few exclusive games that look interesting so that is a bonus.

On the receiver side I'm leaning toward Denon since the 3000 series of receivers have an option to disable DRC when downmixing channels with no center.

If the player is doing the decoding to LPCM it is where the DRC needs to be defeated. Fortunately, there is a setting in the PS3 to do just that.

If I'm not mistaken, the PS3 will only decode the new formats in PCM anyway.