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it's hard to say.

Posted by jeromelang on December 13, 2009 at 23:15:01:
the orignal glossy cabinet PS3 may not be able to output dolby truehd and dts-hd master audio in their native bitstream, but this doesnâ€™t preclude you from enjoying these new formats through your receiver. rather, it simply means that the â€œdecodingâ€ takes place in the PS3 console.

hereâ€™s how it works. The film soundtrack starts out as high-res pcm (pulse code modulation) audio and is encoded into, either dolby truehd or dts-hd ma bitstream for storage on the BD disc. this process it's kinda like creating a zip file on a pc.

the file must then be â€œunzippedâ€ on playback; that is, the dthd or dts-hdma bitstream must be decoded back into multi-channel linear pcm audio for conversion to analog. this decoding can either take place in the PS3 or in the receiver. if the "unzipping" to pcm takes place in the player, the receiver receives high-res pcm over the hdmi interface. the receiver then converts the pcm to analog for listening.

however, if the player is doing the "unzipping" to pcm, it is known that a lot of noise may be generated, due to the player's DSP making a large volume of decoding calculations at high speed when restoring compressed data to original pcm. how will this affect the resultant sound, don't know yet. with this in mind, i did a test around sept last year regarding this issue. i was using the cheapest pioneer BD player against their top of the line receiver, so i was expecting to hear a "large" difference. in the end, much to my surprise, it only made a very small difference sonically where the â€œunzippingâ€ takes placeâ€”in the player or in the receiver. i had to strain to even start hearing any differences. in comparison, switching the hdmi cable's signal flow directionality made much more audible differences. later, tests done on other brands' bd players and receivers combination showed the same level of differences - barely audible.

having said that, i must also say that thereâ€™s a small functional advantage to "unzipping" in the player and outputting pcm on hdmi â€” the BD format has the capability of mixing different audio sources on the fly during playback. an example of this is the directorâ€™s commentary, one of BD's interactivityâ€”features that would be lost if the hd audio-to-pcm 'unzipping" doesnâ€™t take place in the Blu-ray player.