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Do Toshiba players actually do DTS-HD? (1 Viewer)

Greg T

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Theres been a lot of talk on this subject at other sites...speculating that the Toshibas will not do even 5.1 DTS-HD...despite the way they advertise the specs.

In S&V, the Toshiba advertisement has fine print that states..DTS-HD supports up to 5.1 channels of DTS core only.

This would mean either regular DTS or double bit rate...and no lossless.
Someone on a different forum, claims they called DTS, and indeed the Toshibas will not do lossless Dts...according to the poster.

It may not matter much because there are no 7.1 soundtracks yet, and probably will not be many, if any, anytime soon....but has anyone here actually talked to somebody at DTS, to get to the bottom of all of this?
 

Chad R

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Are the new Dolby and DTS formats supposed to be better than Linnear 5.1 PCM? That's the one that sounds the most appealing to me; but, it's being used as a stop gap by Sony on Blu-Ray until they can get the new formats ready.
 

Dan Hitchman

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Short answer: NO. It does not decode the full DTS-HD codec. It only does the lossy core part, which is plain vanilla DTS anyway.

DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TruHD are supposed to be lossless packing compression algorithms that take a PCM track and zip it to about half of its original size. When decoded, nothing is lost and you get the same PCM track that was encoded at the end. They aren't "better" per se, they just save on bitrate allocation and storage space.

Dan
 

Rolando

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So is it still better to use the single coax and have our amp/receiver do the decoding or is there some improvement to justify using the 6 wires out of the player to the 6 audio inputs of the amp?
 

Garrett Lundy

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No pre-amp/receiver on the market can decode DTS-HD or TrueHD right now. And when they can, it'll likely be over HDMI only. (or the analog connectors). But the Toshiba can only decode TrueHD 2.0, you'll have to wait for a player with better audio hardware to get full 5.1 or 7.1 lossless.
 

Paul Hillenbrand

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IMO, the best sound you can get out of the Toshiba is using the 6 analog outs. At least that is the best sound I've experienced from the unit and as a result, am listening to all my HD DVD's that way.

As I understand it, the Toshiba A1 is correctly decoding the HD DVD's 5.1 DD+ signal and the only way one is able to get the full DD+ sound resolution from this player is its analog outs. Others have said that this is the equivalent of "DVD Audio" resolution and it sounds that good to me.;)

Using any other output on the Toshiba A1 will give you lower quality sound. The SPDIF (coaxial, optical) outputs send the DD+ signal out as DTS. Toshiba picked the DTS frequencies, because it was the best {highest bitrate} of the currently compatible possibilities and is quite good, but not as good as hearing it as (native) DD+ through the analog outs.

(Correcting this for accuracy is fine by me.)

Paul
 

TonyD

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what about the sound of a sd dvd?

i thought the sound of A New World using the 6 outs was amazing, much better then the optical out.

also after testing a bunch of sd dvds yesterday to compare the sound i tried a few that had a CENTER rear track and they sounded better using optical out.
the ones without a CENTER rear track sounded better from the 6 outs.
 

Rob_HD

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OK :) I will :)

You ARE mostly right, so this is not an attack at all, just adding a little.

The best sound you can get from the HD DVD players out is through the HDMI connection. That's what I'm using on my Denon 2807. Becuase you are getting the audio as PCM from the player, your AVR's processing and management features are all still active and everything is swell.

Ananlog is next best, but the only problem is most AVRs will just amplify it and send it to the speakers, so you have less control.

The audio on these discs is fantastic, by the way, I'm quite impressed.

Because the advanced new formats used by HD DVD can deliver bit rates that far exceed the capability of SPDIF optical and coaxial, Toshiba used DTS 1.5 mbps as a legacy support feature.

I know Bill's a bit biased, but he neglected to point out that there weren't really any other ways to get around the bandwidth restrictions of these old formats.

He also neglected that the reason that the reason Sony is including LPCM on these first movies, is not because they are "looking ahead" in their wisdom, but because they "neglected" to make these decoders a "required feature" in the Bluray specifications, as HD DVD chose to do.

Down the road, the problem will be that some BR players may support them, and some won't.

Just my 2c
 

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