Quote Originally Posted by gman086
Now am I to understand that ALL true HD audio is compressed and "should" make no difference if sent via PCM or bitstream? I thought the whole purpose of HDMI 1.3 was to have the bandwidth to send uncompressed bistream and avoid the compression issues?
Gman, I'm not an expert in HD video anything, but I can say that not all HD audio is compressed, and more importantly, not all compressed audio is inferior to uncompressed audio.

You can have lossy compression that loses audio quality (think mp3's, Dobly Digital and DTS) and lossless compression that remains sonically perfect but is just a more compact and efficient way of storing the audio information (think FLAC, Dolby TrueHD, etc). Some audio formats on the HD discs are lossy (which can still be incredible if the lost data is stuff the human ear doesn't pick up on well anyway), some formats are lossless which allows less disc space to be used while retaining all of the original audio track, and some formats are uncompressed altogether, which is basically PCM. The uncompressed files won't sound better necessarily unless they were created with superior techniques to begin with. They'll just be bigger file sizes. Whether the uncompressed audio files on the HD formats have some sort of original advantage, I can't say for sure - I was under the impression that the lossless formats were just smaller file size equivalents of the uncompressed PCM, but I'd refer that one back to LJ.

I like to think of lossless compression as the ZIP files of music - IMO they should be the standard anyway but then we start introducing new encoder/decoder requirements in already complicated HT market.