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Originally Posted by chuckg
My poor simple mind wrestles with the notion. Why not simply have 8 channels of 96 kilosamples per second at 24 bits and be done with it? The bit rate would be kinda high, I suppose 
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All these "formats" are just ways to save space, to pack PCM data for storage. "Lossless" codecs, like TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, don't discard any data and when unpacked/decoded are a bit-for-bit identical copy of the encoding master. There's no advantage to this, although it's certainly possible to fit a higher-quality compressed/packed soundtrack than might otherwise fit as PCM.
You can't listen to any of these "formats" in their native form any more than you can read a zipped file, they all originate as PCM and must be decoded to such before processing and D/A conversion. With HD-DVD and BD, this can happen in the player or AVR, a single HDMI cable is required either way.