Video Asylum

Posted by pbarach (A) on October 28, 2016 at 16:49:54

In Reply to: RE: With HDMI Does player's sound matter? posted by Alex F. on October 28, 2016 at 16:47:28

Alex F, it's not true, as you originally wrote, that "Copy-protection requirements eliminated analog audio outputs from Blu-ray players about five years ago." They did no such thing. Many newer players dropped their analog outputs because most TVs and AVRs now have HDMI inputs, which wasn't true when BluRay discs first came out. Oppo and some other high-end players have retained them.

And you've misread that Oppo manual. The full sentence that you quoted refers to digital output from high-rez sources, not analog output:

"Due to copyright restrictions and bandwidth limitations, SACD audio cannot be sent through the coaxial/optical audio output, and the high resolution audio on DVD-Audio and Blu-ray discs will be sent out at reduced resolution."

The Oppo player converts the full high-rez digital audio track from a BluRay or SACD to analog, and that is what it outputs through its 7.1 RCA analog outputs. Look at the chart on p.64 of the Oppo manual. The copyright/copy restrictions on audio are spelled out in more detail on p. 17, and it's clear that they apply only to the various digital outputs.

The Cinavia copy protection doesn't prevent a video player like Oppo from converting a high-rez audio track and outputting it as analog, nor does it prevent an AVR (or DAC) that gets a high-rez audio track from a player via HDMI from converting the audio to analog and sending it through analog outputs.