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Originally Posted by Mixology
The first thing that surprised me was the almost complete lack of DVD or Blue Ray players with built in surround decoding. I have searched high and low and the only one I've found with any merit is the Denon 1940CI.
My second surprise came as I tried to comprehend my first surprise. I assumed if there were no players with built in decoders there surely must be dozens of stand alone decoders... no? Well, apparently... no, there are very few of those either. In fact, I've yet to find one other than the professional one from Dolby.
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Most consumers interested in multi-channel surround use AV receivers or HTIB solutions. These all have decoders built-in, so there's no demand for redundant standalone decoders, so not surprisingly you can't find them anymore. These used to be around 11 years ago when Dolby Digital was first coming out, and there were receivers with only analog multi-ch ins released w/o any built-in decoding, but after awhile they were dropped as everything became built-in. Early DVD players often had decoders (& DVD-A/SACD universal models still do), but they are dropped on the cheaper models now since there is next to zero margin left in std DVD players and most people wouldn't need them. I don't see why this should be at all surprising to you.
As for Blu-ray, there are lots of players w/ built-in decoding for most of the audio formats, it's only hard to find decoding for DTS-HD/MA which will come out in players later this year. Though I don't know what constitutes "merit" for you.
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to pass digital audio... And if I can't find a stand alone decoder I guess I need a receiver with line outputs for L, C, R, Ls, Rs, & LFE. So, does any one know where I can find these things? Or does anyone have a better idea?
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There are a zillion receivers with analog line-level preamp-outs. Just look at the more expensive $450+ models from Onkyo, Yamaha, Denon, etc., rather than the cheaper < $400 models.