Quote Originally Posted by kelsci
Nice review your lordship. I would think that the uncompressed BR audio is CD quality. If that is so the last video machine that gave us this type of sound with movies was Laserdisc with their two channel digital soundtracks(I saw one dvd that supposedly had CD audio for sale which was THIS ISLAND EARTH a few years back). Now you are talking an additional 3.1 tracks here of rather powerful sound. I have read varying reports on both machines around the net. It should be interesting what you have to report on your test of the HD-DVD machine. From what I understand it has Dolby Digital Plus on some soundtracks but that DD+ can only be heard in all its glory thru the analog outputs of that machine. If you do not hook up the analog outputs, the D.D.+ goes thru a conversion to PCM and back into DTS which of course is outputed thru a coaxial or optical cable. By the time you test that machine, there could possibly be discs with 5.1 DD-HD althoug from what I have read, there is a two channel DD-HD track on THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA.
The uncompressed PCM in the case of BRD is not quite CD quality, but does approach it. The DTS MA Lossless will be CD quality or better whenever it is released (I believe a title or two was recently announced for BRD). I believe it has the capability to go to 24 bit audio.

In the case of HD DVD, you can also output the DD+ from the HDMI out. I have only used it through the analog outs, and it sounds quite good... That said, the Toshiba now has the full 5.1 DD TrueHD Lossless cpabilities through firmware 2.0. I have only watched one disc with DD TrueHD 5.1 (Training Day), but the differences are quite large compared to regular DD (and even DD+). DD TrueHD is CD quality, BTW.

BTW: Phantom of the Opera is full 5.1 DD TrueHD Lossless, not 2.1. The Toshiba could only play the 2.1 channels orginally, until the firmware upgraded the units to 5.1 capability for the format.

---Dave