toshiba hd-dvd owners comment on player decoding

[damonrpayne]

In a Hifi shop today where I was listening to a new hdmi 1.3 preprocessor, the owner talked to me about the various different ways he had tried to hook up the hd-dvd player to the pre/pro for ideal sound. His test is the Dolby Digital+ soundtrack on the Batman Begins hd-dvd. He claimed that allowing the player to decode Dolby Digital+ and pass LPCM to the pre/pro over HDMI sounded like crap, and that his favorite was selecting the dolby digital+ but passing over coax, which forces it to be downsampled to 1.5mb/s. This seemed ludicrous to me but as the wife was along I wasn't in the mood to challenge and demand a demonstration.

I'm sure there's a few hd-dvd owners out there, what kind of connections are you using?

[MrMcGoo]

Batman Begins is one of the best sound tracks on HD DVD. It has Dolby TrueHD and DD+ at 640kbps. If you connect by Toslink or coax and use the DD+ sound track, you have just added an unnecessay layer of compression. That is, you decode DD+, then you recompress it as DTS @1.5 Mbps. This is not good.

The reason that the DTS output sounded better is likely to be from the fact that under cetain circumstances, the LFE channel is 10 db too low. The analog outputs are too easy to overload and the 10 db reduction found its way into PCM output. The PCM output needs correcting via firmware for this 10 db deficit. When the firmware will be avaiable I do not know.

I prefer the analog output of TrueHD on Batman. I crank up my LFE processor by 10 db and all is well.

Bill

[sfogg]

"He claimed that allowing the player to decode Dolby Digital+ and pass
LPCM to the pre/pro over HDMI sounded like crap, and that his favorite
was selecting the dolby digital+ but passing over coax, which forces it
to be downsampled to 1.5mb/s. "

Did you happen to find out what pre-pro he had? It may have only accepted 2 channels over HDMI in which case using the recompressed DTS output over S/PDIF would sound better.

Otherwise... he is nuts. 6 channels of LPCM over HDMI on Batman Begins using the Dolby THD (didn't Dolby consider the initials of their format at all when they named it???) sounds extremely good.

Shawn

[damonrpayne]

The preprocessor is the Integra 9.8, which I am very likely to buy if they get them in this week. It's full HDMI 1.3a and should obviously be able to accept multi channel LPCM over HDMI decoded by the player. Like I said the wife and kid was with so I didn't challenge his assertion, but I thought either:

1) he is crazy

2) he is trying to impress me

3) he had the player set up incorrectly. I am not too familiar with the toshiba players but I'm guessing there may be options that would hoze it up.

Dolby THD: maybe it means "Tasty Harmonic Dreamland"

[JTYoung]

Why was he sending DD+ over HDMI when there is a TrueHD track available for the player to decode and send as PCM over HDMI?
As it stands right now there are no players out that will send Bitstream over HDMI to a 1.3 receiver, not that there is anything wrong with being ready for when they finally do release players that will. The TrueHD is a compressed lossless track whereas DD+ is a lossy track.

You do need to set up the decoding properly in the player so it will send the stream correctly to the receiver, he probably set it up as PCM instead of Auto. When set as PCM it does all of the decoding in the player and converts it to PCM and sends it to the receiver to play. The Auto setting sends DD, DTS, and DD+ to the receiver as bitstream for it to decode and converts the advanced codecs to PCM before sending them to the player to decode.

EDIT: I have my HD DVD player and my Blu-ray player connected to my Yamaha RXV-861 (HDMI 1.2a) via HDMI. I generally don't listen to the DD+ track when I have a TrueHD or LPCM track available.

[el jopez]

It is my understanding that sending the bitstream to the receiver with HD-DVD is pointless. Due to the formats restrictions, when viewing say the movie and a commentary or any other interactive features simultaneously, the player itself has to decode the audio for the mixed content, making it redundant to have a receiver decoding the new audio formats. I beleive Blu-Ray doesn't have this problem. Does anyone have any other insight into this?

[MatrixDweller]

I have a HD-A2 and a Denon 3805. Thus no HDMI PCM. What I've noticed is that when I select the DD+ or Dolby TrueHD soundtrack the volume is muted a good 5-10dB on the reciever (eg: the same sound level obtained on regular DD being -50dB, I have to turn it up to -40dB to get the same sound level with DD+ DTrueHD).

My ears can't tell much of a difference between the downsampled DD+ DTureHD 1.5mbps DTS bitstream and normal DTS or DD other than the volume change.

Both Dolby Digital and the new HD formats are down/re-sampled to DTS, so
are the new HD formats just recorded lower to give more dynamic range?

[damonrpayne]

It is my understanding that sending the bitstream to the receiver with HD-DVD is pointless. Due to the formats restrictions, when viewing say the movie and a commentary or any other interactive features simultaneously, the player itself has to decode the audio for the mixed content, making it redundant to have a receiver decoding the new audio formats. I beleive Blu-Ray doesn't have this problem. Does anyone have any other insight into this?

Same for blu-ray, though I don't know if its a "problem" in any case.

[damonrpayne]

I have a HD-A2 and a Denon 3805. Thus no HDMI PCM. What I've noticed is that when I select the DD+ or Dolby TrueHD soundtrack the volume is muted a good 5-10dB on the reciever (eg: the same sound level obtained on regular DD being -50dB, I have to turn it up to -40dB to get the same sound level with DD+ DTrueHD).

My ears can't tell much of a difference between the downsampled DD+ DTureHD 1.5mbps DTS bitstream and normal DTS or DD other than the volume change.

Both Dolby Digital and the new HD formats are down/re-sampled to DTS, so are the new HD formats just recorded lower to give more dynamic range?

I don't know that you would tell much difference in the downsampled. The ultra high bitrates is the whole point to the new sound formats.

[eq_shadimar]

I have used both the coax digital and the 6 channel (5.1) analog outputs on my A1 HD DVD player. Both sound fantastic. I am currently running the analog outputs of the HD DVD player into the analog inputs on my Panasonic SA-XR55 digital amp. It took several hours to get all the levels balanced but I love the sound.

Laters,

Jeff

[Professor.Ham.Slap]

I will also hop in and say that the new formats sound phenomenal via HDMI. I am really waiting for this whole TrueHD thing to start kicking off in terms of movies though.