Blue Man Group Blu-Ray (1 Viewer)

I caught a few minutes of How to be a Mega-star on Dish and was amazed. So, I went out and bought the blu-ray. I watched it in 5.1 PCM, which I thought was supposed to sound better, and I was let down. It sounded so much better in dolby digital 5.1. Is it just me or is something up with the disc? It didn't sound bad by any means...but DD sounded much cleaner.

This was also the first time I used the 5.1 PCM function on my receiver

You have some sort of setup issue if "It sounded so much better in dolby digital 5.1".

I watched this the other night and thought it sounded incredible in 5.1 PCM. One of the better BR concert discs. This disc had all the characteristics of lossless audio....amazing transparency, very clean present sound, very tight, powerfull, clean and punchy low end, etc......maybe you have a setup issue if this is the first PCM track you have played? The DD track should in no way be sounding "so much better" than the PCM and the exact opposite should be going on if anything.

What BR player are you using and what exactly sounded so much better with the DD? Maybe we can figure out what is going on with your equipment.

One other thought, did you actualy select PCM 5.1 from the disc menu? If not, you might have listened to the DD track.

A follow-up to Todd's questions: how is the player connected to your A/V receiver: optica;/coaxial digital cable (like on a DVD player), HDMI or do you have 6 analog RCA cables connecting them?

Not to get off topic Adam, but I love your signature and could not agree more

Everything is in my sig. It's a Panasonic 35 BD player and everything is connected via HDMI. Can you explain what the difference is between the two? DD and PCM. The PCM seemed, how can I put it...overmodulated. Not to a great degree, but it seemed less clean, and the bass seemed deeper in DD. I might also be crazy and need to sit down and go over both settings again, but at first glance...this is what I thought.

Thanks, I was driven to that.

PCM is uncompressed audio. Dolby Digital uses a lot of compression. Don't confuse Dolby Digital with Dolbly TrueHD which is another flavor of uncompressed audio. The display of the Denon should show Multi Ch in (or something similar) if you are receiving PCM from the BD player. If everything is set up at worst you should hear no difference between Dolby Digital and PCM, although in most cases the lossless PCM should sound better.

It said Multi channel IN on the display...so it was in PCM. I also just got some new/old klipsch mains, and I've been doing a lot of tweaking with levels and frequency...so maybe I was just in a fog from all the messin around and for some reason thought DD sounded better...I dunno, maybe I switched it back and forth and everytime I tried DD it was a good clean music part, and when I went to PCM, it was lots of applause and stage noise. Thanks for the clarification though!

Not sure what is going on. Give it another listen as this PCM 5.1 track is VERY clean and just a great track overall. As Adam said at the VERY least the DD and PCM should sound the same and most likely the PCM will sound better to some degree as it is uncompressed while the DD is compressed.

There isn't any way that I could have the denon set so that it would somehow not relay PCM as good as it can is there?

Not that I can think of off hand.

Not sure if this applies here, but I've heard of cases where people didn't turn off HDMI audio from their AVR to their TV. The end result is that the TV talks to the AVR which talks to the BD player, which can result in the player downmixing the audio to stereo (because that's all the TV can handle). The AVR then applies Dolby PL to get surround, which wouldn't be nearly as good as 5.1 PCM.