Video Asylum

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr (A) on March 18, 2006 at 17:03:56

In Reply to: Things are still unclear posted by Tommart on March 18, 2006 at 12:25:37:

#1 The Toshiba reps are not the most informed people to be asking questions. In case you didn't hear it at that event, they are the ones who said 1080p video output was not possible at this time. Guess they never heard of BluRay in their little world, because 1080p24 output (and 1080p60) is available. I've read several reports from industry people who asked questions that could either not be answered or were vaguely answered. And if the question was not asked specifically about the analog outputs, there's always the chance that they were speaking specifically about the digital outputs.

#2 Inside the players will be a decoder to decode the codec and turn it into 8 channels of PCM audio. This audio will be D/Aed by the audio DACs and sent out through the analog outputs. There's the analog part of the High Resolution audio.

#3 Here's the two digital versions of the High Resolution audio. Via HDMI, the decoded-to-PCM digital audio will be sent to a receiver/processor to be DAed. The receiver/processor will be responsible for providing the analog version of the audio. All HDMI v1.1 products can handle this.

The specs are not finalized yet, but when HDMI v1.3 gets here, the players will be able to send the undecoded digital audio to a receiver/processor. The receiver/processor would then be responsible for decoding to PCM and providing the analog version of the audio. This version will require both HDMI ends to be v1.3 (and today's receivers/processors can't handle that future v1.3 capability).

#4 Here's an excerpt from Amazon.com. They left off PCM and DTS-HD, but it's in there as well:
"Processing Prowess The HD-XA1 has far-from-ordinary built-in multichannel decoders for Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD (2 ch.) and DTS. The HD-XA1 employs four high-performance DSP engines to decode the multichannel streams of the wide array of audio formats. These 32-bit floating-point DSPs are world renowned for their high accuracy and are used in many high-quality audio solutions in the home theater market. The DSPs handle many of the required conversion processes, as well as the extensive on-board multichannel signal management for the HD-XA1, including user-selectable crossovers, delay management, and channel level management. After decoding and signal management, the digital audio is converted to analog by way of 24 bit/192kHz audio DAC and output as 5.1 analog audio."

It's about 1/3 down the page:

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