On January 1, 2009 at 19:40, Herman Trivilino said...
But, if I understand what you said later in the post,
my old receiver will play the TrueHD tracks, but I would
not be hearing the actual uncompressed TrueHD tracks.
They'll be the lossy compression of the older DVD-quality.
Correct?
Not exactly. Both DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD are made up of two audio streams: a backwards-compatible "core" stream, and the actual uncompressed stream. The optical and coaxial outputs cannot handle the uncompressed audio streams, so all you'll get is the "core" stream.
Both cores are no different in technology from normal DVD-level audio, but they are slightly higher quality... for example DVD supports a maximum of 448kbit for Dolby Digital, but BD (and thus the TrueHD core) outputs 640kbit. This actually turned out to be a bit of a problem for poor-quality Dolby Digital decoders, which couldn't handle bitrates higher than DVD spec (even though official Dolby spec always allowed for 640kbit).
That'd be awesome. But I wonder if I could really hear
any difference with my modest system. I guess it'd depend
on the quality of my speakers, and how discerning my ears
are!
It's true that you do need good quality equipment to best enjoy the improvement. However with that said there IS a major improvement.
So, I take it that having the 5.1 or 7.1 analog outputs
is no guarantee that the BD player will decode the DTS-HD
audio, or even the TrueHD audio.
TrueHD, probably. I believe any player you can buy today with 5.1/7.1 analog outputs would be able to internally decode TrueHD. However there are still some players that lack internal DTS-HD MA support.
