Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Quick Question (I hope) about lossless & gear

Perc, welcome. I'll comment on one point: there's no bandwidth or other problem involving transmission capacity that would prevent either toslink or a regular digital coaxial cable from being used for these formats. The problem is copy protection paranoia and only a digital transmission link with inherent copy protection(e.g. HDMI)or an analog link can be used. Toslink is inherently a digital link and for that reason can't be used, but it has nothing to do with inadequate bandwidth.

JohnK, is that true? Do you have a source to cite? It seems like I've always heard that bandwidth was indeed an issue, at least for toslink. I don't remember hearing one way or another for digital coax.

From High-Def Digest. Blu-ray and HD DVD Audio Explained A good article for the HD sound formats.

Oh, hey, I was actually just reading that article last week. I obviously didn't read it with enough mental presence.

You retained enough to remember about the bandwidth.

Homedad: thanks for confirming.

JohnK: thanks for clarifying why Toslink won't work.

Pickupmykeys: Thanks for the tip on calibrating...sounds like fun and I've never done it before. As for the articles, I read one in it's entirety but the other had so many pages I didn't get through it all.

From Bob P.'s article, it seems like when he wrote that, no players were decoding DTS-HD MA. But now, with the likes of the Toshiba A35, which per their website decodes both lossless formats, and is HDMI 1.3, I don't understand why it wouldn't work. Maybe the answer was in the other article and will just require a free evening to read through it all. Thanks for the help.

Yes, Toshiba makes Toslinks(Toshiba links)available in various bandwidths, as shown in their Product Guide . If it was otherwise acceptable bandwidth wouldn't be a problem.

Hello again Perc.

The PS3 will output the HD audio track or PCM track via MPCM over HDMI.

There is so much information to sift through (not to mention all the vague marketing drivel). With regards to the HD DVD player, I think the answer to your question is no you don't require a receiver that is 1.3 so long as your receiver can accept MPCM via HDMI. The player will decode the audio and send it to your receiver as PCM.

As long as the HD player will decode the audio HDMI 1.3 is not needed.HDMI 1.1 or 1.2 will do the trick.
Where HDMI 1.3 is needed on both devices is if the audio is not decoded by the HD player and is sent via bitsreem to the receiver.
This may be necessary for DTS HD when some of the players update to transfer DTS in bitsream only, so the receiver would need to be HDMI 1.3 compliant to decode the DTS HD signal.

The PS3 will decode every codec with the exception of DTS-M. It is rumored that there will be a firmware update coming before Christmas to address this, and I have no reason to not believe it. Sony has been very forthcoming with firmware updates for the PS3. Sony has been pushing updates to this machine at a very impressive rate. If you do have a DTS-M only Blu Ray disk, you will not get lossless sound, but you will get the “core” DTS audio stream that is embedded in the DTS-M stream (I can verify this with the Blu Ray disk Condemned that I have).

As Homedad noted, you will need a receiver with HDMI 1.1 or greater to hear Lossless sound from the PS3. The PS3 does not have analogue outputs.

The A35 decodes both DD TrueHD and DTS-M. I’m not certain, but I think the Samsung has a player that decodes all the formats as well with a newly released firmware update. No others do from what I understand. The Toshiba HD-X2 is also rumored to have a new firmware update coming out soon to enable DTS-M and DD TrueHD decoding. Hard telling if it will work correctly as Toshiba’s firmware updates tend to come with bugs that need additional firmware updates to address. (for that reason, I am hesitant to buy an X2 and am probably going to buy the A35 because it works correctly out of the box)

If you decide to use a non HDMI receiver and use its 7 channel analogue inputs, you will not be able to use the receiver’s Bass Management functions and will have to rely of whatever the source player provides, and you will be limited to only one device unless you like to pull and plug in different device cables every time you use a different player.

The other option of course, is to buy a HDMI 1.3 receiver that is KNOWN to decode DTS-M and DD TrueHD. The new Denons and Onkyo’s do this. I’m not sure about the new Yamaha’s or any other unit for that matter……I stopped reading the AVS threads a while ago. There is a debate going on (which I have no opinion to who is right) that there is an advantage with the audio processor doing the decoding verses the player. If the player does the decoding, it will send a multi-channel PCM audio stream to the audio processor. If the audio processor has the ability to recognize and decode the codecs, the player will send the audio processor a lossless bitstream audio stream to the receiver and the receiver decodes it to PCM for further surround processing.

Some folks think the audio processor will do a better job at decoding the data, others feel this is hogwash and an X is an X and an O is an O so there should be no audible differences. This is a debate I do not care to get into any more than speaker wires, speaker break in or DAC comparisons….. Not worth the effort to me.

Bandwidth limitations are something that I’m not too sure about. I’m not sure if Toslink or Coax can carry a full 24 bit / 96 Hz X 7 channel data steam (DTS-M and DD TrueHD), PLUS 1080P/60 video data with 16 bit True Color. I think it may be beyond Toslink capacity, but again, I’m not sure. It really doesn’t matter anyway seeing how HDCP is embedded in the HD data streams and only HDMI provides the required handshake data path for this to occur.