Panny BD55 hdmi or analog

[plip]

Hi,

I have a Panasonic BD55 Blu-ray player (which I am very happy with) but I do have a question about the audio options. At the moment, I have the panny connected over hdmi with my Onkyo SR606 receiver. Would I gain something in audio quality if I use the pannys 7.1 analog outputs and bring the audio signal that way to the Onkyo ? Is there any expected improvement or will the audio be of the same -already high - quality ?

My speakers are from Kef (2005.2).

Thx !

[Greggles]

This is an Internal versus External decoding question. At present the BDP is “bitstreaming” un-decoded audio to the Onkyo amp, which in turn carries out the audio decoding (assuming it is DTS MA/ Dolby TruHD capable).
If you were to switch to the analogue connections, the BDP would carry out the decoding internally and sending discrete PCM audio to each channel on the Amp. As to which one sounds better; this depends on the quality of the chipsets in the BDP and Amp respectively.
There are two other issues to be considered when using analogue connections:
i) Bass management of most amplifiers are bypassed, meaning that you have to use the (usually rather restricted) bass management on the BDP;
ii) A small point I know, but the display on the Amp will show PCM rather than the audio codec being used.

[BIslander]

Greggles is sort of right, although he's confusing player decoding for PCM transmission to player decoding for analog transmission in a few places. There are three choices, not just two.

1. Bitstream to your receiver as you are now.

2. Decode in the player and send the resulting PCM over HDMI to your receiver for processing. This is still a digital connection and uses the receiver for all processing and the digital-analog conversion. The audio quality should be the same as #1. Decoding is nothing more than unzipping a compressed file and the receiver is still doing all of the processing.

If you have a 7.1 system, there could be one difference from bitstreaming. The Onkyo 605s could not handle 7.1 PCM, just 5.1. I don't know whether that is the case for the 606.

One advantage to PCM is that you can turn on secondary audio. With bitstream, you have turn secondary audio off. Otherwise the player will output lossy 5.1 instead of the lossless version.

3. Decode in the player for analog transmission. This takes the receiver pretty much out of the picture. The PCM is processed in the player and converted to analog there. Analog audio, not PCM, is sent to the receiver, which merely amplifies it. The player does bass management and EQ and, as Greggles noted, it probably has worse tools for these jobs than your AVR. But, it may have better DACs (digital-analog converters) than your Onkyo. Analog is a bit of a pain to set up and is likely to be a bit worse, not better, than using HDMI because most players can't process the audio as well as most receivers. So, I'd suggest you stay with HDMI.

[plip]

Thank you both, Greggles and BIslander, for your explanation !

So I will stay with hdmi (less hassle too).