Most Home Theater Receivers Don't Do Blu-Ray or HD-DVD
If you're contemplating buying a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, you may be focusing on the dreamy 1080p picture (some of) the players can provide. But if your receiver is a year old or older, you probably won't be able to pipe a 1080p signal through your receiver, and your receiver may also be incapable of delivering TrueHD and DTS-HD Master audio, the new high-end audio formats offered by (some of) those players.
First, the video issue: A small number of receivers, including a few announced at last month's Consumer Electronics Show, will switch 1080p content from a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player via an HDMI connection. (A receiver that can “switch” HMDI has multiple HDMI inputs to which you can connect devices, and at least one HDMI output to which you’d connect your television.) Manufacturers of receivers that offer 1080p capability--not just 1080i--include Denon, Harman Kardon, Onkyo, and Yamaha, among others.
But no receiver you can buy today will decode the 7.1-channel, super-high-bit-rate TrueHD or DTS-HD Master formats, because none offers the proper decoder chips. You will be able to connect a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD player and get some sound through your receiver, because the discs that offer TrueHD or DTS-HD Master tracks will also have lower-quality "core" audio tracks that will play through older equipment.
The complicated part: The HDMI 1.3 specification claims TrueHD and DTS-HD Master capability among its features. But DTS says that you can get DTS-HD Master even if your receiver (and player) have HDMI 1.1 or 1.2 ports. In that case, the player would output an uncompressed multi-channel PCM audio stream to your receiver; here, the player does the decoding instead of the receiver. To go this route, your player must have a DTS-HD Master or TrueHD decoder, and your receiver must be able to accept a multi-channel linear PCM signal.
Another option: If the player has the proper decoders and multi-channel analog outputs, you can connect them to analog inputs on your receiver, which would simply amplify the signal and send it on to your speakers (but boy, that's a lotta cables).
DTS has an excellent primer on this stuff; Dolby has one too.
Sherwood announced the first receiver with HDMI 1.3 at last month's CES; the Newcastle R-972 also features DTS-HD Master and TrueHD support and 1080p video support. It'll even have six HDMI-in ports. But it won't ship until August, and it'll cost $1500. Of the companies I contacted, only Denon would say when it would announce receivers with TrueHD or DTS-HD Master support (later this year). Harman Kardon, Onkyo, and Pioneer would not commit to a timeframe.
Players with TrueHD and DTS-HD Master include the Sony PlayStation 3 (which also has HDMI 1.3). Toshiba's HD-XA1, HD-A1, and HD-A2, support playback of TrueHD and DTS-HD "core", which is a lower-bit-rate version with only 5.1-channel support. Pioneer's $1500 Elite BDP-HD1 Blu-Ray player doesn't even support that: If you insert a disc with DTS-HD or TrueHD tracks on it, the player will output 48-KHz, 5.1-channel output--the same as you'd get from a DVD. Bleh!
With audio, I've heard two conflicting recommendations over the years: One says that you should keep the signal digital as long as possible, and the other says that your best piece of equipment should perform the digita-to-analog decoding. So, in the case of DVD-Audio playback, for example, if you have a killer DVD player (that can decode DVD-A) and a so-so receiver, that you should connect the DVD player to your receiver via analog cables. If your DVD player is so-so and your receiver's the star, connect via digital cables, so that the receiver does the decoding. It may be the same case with TrueHD and DTS-HD Master, but you may be forced to use your player's decoder, at least in the beginning.
The other, more recent recommendation: Don't look for a HDMI 1.3 connection on your next receiver. Instead, look for the features you want--namely, look for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master support first, because at some point, receivers could come with HDMI 1.3 and not support for those formats.
So, boiling it down: To hear the best possible audio from Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, you'll need the following:
-Content (discs) that use the new audio formats (they're rare, from what I've seen)
-A Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player that will decode TrueHD or DTS-HD Master audio and a receiver with either HDMI 1.1/1.2 or 7.1-channel analog inputs, [or]
-A receiver that will decode TrueHD and DTS-HD Master (it will likely have HDMI 1.3, but look for the audio-format logos on the front of the receiver).
Now who'd like to be the first to say, "No thanks; I'll stick with my 13-inch black-and-white TV"?
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Alan, you have missed the point. What a consumer is now getting is better audio with less gear and this is great; not the ciaos you describe. This is because the direction the CE world is going in is to remove the audio decoding from the receiver and put it into the player. This accomplishes two things: 1) removes the requirement to have a second piece of gear [receiver] to get high quality audio and 2) it enables Picture and Picture and other secondary audio to be dynamically mixed with the main audio in the movie. Check out any of the many HD DVDs with picture in picture. They are very cool. Another important point you missed is that every single HD DVD player supports 100% of the Dolby Digital Plus and Dolby TrueHD codecs. Sadly this is not the case with Blu-ray. When shopping for a receiver, you do not want to look for the audio codec logos. Instead one just has to look for a receiver that sounds good and has multiple HDMI connections.
Perhaps I am going overboard. And I understand that HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players will offer neat things like the ability to overlay data downloaded from the Web. But I still think, if you're considering buying new equipment, that sadly, you have to consider much more than mere audio quality. This is a minefield.
For example, not sure about the wording of Toshiba's specs--it may be that its players support TrueHD fully but only the core version of DTS-HD (regardless, they don't support DTS-HD Master). The low-end model doesn't have HDMI or discrete multi-channel analog output.
I also wonder about how the other features supported by HDMI 1.3--the higher color bit depth, audio syncing, etc., will be implemented. When those features are implemented, will receivers need additional hardware to support them?
Maybe the future is to let playback devices handle the decoding. But after seeing the guts of some of the playback devices we're talking about, I'm not yet ready to let go.
Followup: As it turns out, only one of the devices we're testing for our upcoming roundup of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players supports TrueHD, and none supports DTS-HD Master.