A Guide to Home Theater Audio CODECs

[Silencer]

Originally Posted by Big Daddy

Your bandwidth statement is only correct about SACD and DVD-A. However, it is not correct about Lossless Audio Codecs such as LPCM, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS MA.

According to Toshiba, the inventor of Toslink (Toshiba Link), the maximum bandwith of an enhanced Toslink cable is around 6Mbs. LPCM, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS HD MA require more than that. HDMI's bandwidth is around 37Mbs. In addition, Toslink has a length limitation. I believe it is around 5 meters.

This is a quote from Wikipedia:

"Connecting a TrueHD source to a TrueHD receiver requires a digital-link capable of transporting either the encoded bitstream (up to 18 Mbit/s), or the unpacked linear-PCM audio (>35 Mbit/s). HDMI 1.1 (and higher) can transport multichannel PCM-audio, and therefore can transport an unpacked TrueHD audiotrack. An HDMI 1.3 (or higher) link is required to transport TrueHD in raw bitstream form. TOSLINK (and SPDIF) cannot carry TrueHD without transcoding, due to limitations of the specification."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolby_TrueHD

Hi !

I am a little bit disappointed by the Wikipedia quote regarding the HDMI version required to carry unpacked TrueHD and raw bitstream. Unpacked TrueHD is equivalent to LPCM right ? And thus has higher bitrate than raw bitstream which in compressed... so why raw bitstream is requiring HDMI 1.3.
Now I've got an additional question : are HD-non fitted receiver capable of playing TrueHD or DDPlus through HDMI 1.3 connection with some HD-decoding fitted players ?

Thank you in advance.

- Stéphane B.