Dts-ma???

Does anyone have any information on when the DTS-MA chips will be out???

I guess no-one knows....

Onkyo announced the release of their TX-SR605 for late May, with a $600 price tag and then later in the year with the high-end THS ultra 2-c certified TX-S4806 @ $1099.00 according to High Def Digest. The Pioneer Elite series: "VSX-91TXH, VSX-92TXH and VSX-94TXH -- will support HDMI V1.3a connectivity. These 'high resolution powerhouses' will seamlessly pass 1080p video while also decoding the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Lossless Audio formats." according to the same source.

What about the software?

There are several Blue-Ray discs that carry uncompressed lpcm tracks,Kingdom of Heaven comes to mind right off,but there are many others.This would be the same as DTS-MA and is availabe from the analog outs or HDMI if you use it.

bill

I'm very curious to see what happens once the Onkyo's hit the street next week.

Well the Onkyo's are out but there are no players capable of passing the DTSMA bitstream signal. And my understanding is that 99% of the software won't allow the signal the leave the player anyways. Looks like uncompressed PCM is the way to go right now.

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Originally Posted by L.J.

Well the Onkyo's are out but there are no players capable of passing the DTSMA bitstream signal. And my understanding is that 99% of the software won't allow the signal the leave the player anyways. Looks like uncompressed PCM is the way to go right now.

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Thanks for the update LJ, basically my point is that right now the devices on the market doesn't seem to be up-to-date with the technology. Even if you think that you have the best-of-the-best right now with the HD discs you really aren't getting all that there is, just yet.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by L.J.

Well the Onkyo's are out but there are no players capable of passing the DTSMA bitstream signal. And my understanding is that 99% of the software won't allow the signal the leave the player anyways. Looks like uncompressed PCM is the way to go right now.

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Yup, the AVS Forum had a huge discussion on this topic a few months ago, and the consensus seemed to be that DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD decoding capability will be a non-starter because more and more of the discs are getting the "advanced" mastering that does not allow for the DTS-HD/TrueHD bitstream to leave the player. And if the player transcodes the TrueHD or DTS-HD signal to LPCM (which I believe all Blu-ray players sold after October will be required to do), it won't matter much since the audio will remain lossless and output at full resolution. Given the current lack of DTS-HD and TrueHD decoders out there, it will be interesting to see what, if any, differences there are between a natively decoded DTS-HD/TrueHD signal versus a transcoded output decoded in PCM once people can start doing their own comparisons.

The Blu-ray camp has been going with uncompressed PCM for the most part, and even Warner has begun issuing Blu-ray discs with uncompressed PCM audio. But, I am a bit perturbed that some of these lossless tracks get encoded at the lower 48/16 resolution, while some TrueHD tracks on HD-DVDs (which cannot use uncompressed PCM due to disc space limitations) have been encoded at full 96/24 resolution. If disc space becomes an issue, given PCM's inherent inefficiency, then I would hope that Blu-ray producers make more use of TrueHD and/or DTS-HD, since the players themselves are (or will be via firmware updates) capable of transcoding the data into PCM.