help with truehd/dts master

[blu-rayguy]

hi guys i need some help.. ive resently purchased a onkyo amp that has dolby true hd/dts master audio.. do u have to have a blu-ray player that suports these two formats in order to get dolby true/dts master... i have a sony bdps300 which dosent have these on there when i hooked it all up it didnt work i done the software up grade(to get dolby true) and it still dosent work ne help on this please

[un4gvn94538]

youll need a player that can bitstream the audio for the reciever to decode. for example the sony s350.

the update you did for your player to decode should work if your receiver as 5.1 or 7.1 analog inputs. then you would use the analog output from your player to the analog inputs of the receiver for true hd.

[BIslander]

You didn't mention the Onkyo model you bought. But, if it has TrueHD and dts-MA decoders, then it has to have HDMI 1.3 and it will support both HD bitstreams and multichannel PCM.

As for your player, the S301 lacks HD bitstream capability. But, with the firmware update, it can decode TrueHD for output over HDMI. So, you should be good to go for Dolby, but you'll be limited to the DTS core tracks (which sound great, btw). As far as I know, you don't need to bother with analog. PCM over HDMI will work with your player and receiver.

[Rob J in WNY]

Evidently, the Sony BDP-S300 will not send native audio bitstream for decoding at the receiver, which is rather unfortunate because, otherwise, you could just let your Onkyo do all the decoding.

Indeed, the firmware upgrade does give you TrueHD decoding in the player, but not DTS HD-Master Audio. You can send the decoded TrueHD audio via HDMI to your receiver if you change your player's HDMI audio output to "PCM" rather than the default "Auto" setting. Then, the S300 will send the decoded TrueHD audio as LPCM out of HDMI. Your receiver will display that it is receiving PCM audio.

As an aside, I often wonder why some BD players (more specifically some older ones), didn't at least support bitstreaming of audio. It's basically just a function of reading the raw data off the disc and sending it out as-is. It seems a simple enough function that engineers would certainly not have overlooked, especially with the ongoing technology of Blu-ray.

[BIslander]

Originally Posted by Rob J in WNY

As an aside, I often wonder why some BD players (more specifically some older ones), didn't at least support bitstreaming of audio. It's basically just a function of reading the raw data off the disc and sending it out as-is. It seems a simple enough function that engineers would certainly not have overlooked, especially with the ongoing technology of Blu-ray.

"Just" and "simple" are not words often associated with HD audio codecs. The powerhouse PS3 still doesn't have HD bitstream support. At any rate, I don't think HDMI supported HD bitstreams when the S300/301 was released. That came later.