Maximizing Your Blu-ray Audio Experience
Everyone knows that high definition content looks better than standard definition. We can all see the difference. With blu-ray looking to be the successor to DVD, many consumers have made the leap to purchasing standalone blu-ray players, or the ultimate Trojan horse for the blu-ray format, the Playstation 3. Combined with a quality display, the picture quality will no doubt be superb, but that is only half of what blu-ray has to offer. Many people don’t know the auditory benefits blu-ray has to offer. A dual layer blu-ray disc can store 50 GB of data; more than six times the storage capacity of a dual layer DVD. With the extra storage capacity, blu-ray discs are capable of playing back lossless audio effortlessly. DVD cannot. The standard Dolby Digital and DTS (Digital Theater Systems) soundtracks are compressed audio formats. The lossless audio formats on blu-ray discs are Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA (High Definition Master Audio) and PCM.
PCM (Pulse Code Modulation) is simply a digital representation of an analog signal. LPCM (Lossless PCM) is not compressed in any way. It’s a bit for bit representation of the studio master.
While PCM is great, it is not the most efficient way for movie studios to use in offering lossless audio tracks in terms of space usage on a disk. PCM takes up a lot of disc real estate. When blu-ray and the now defunct HD DVD formats came on the scene, two new audio codecs also came along that would take full advantage of lossless audio, while using less space that PCM. The two audio codecs are Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. They use less disk space because of lossless compression. It’s a technique that the movie studios implement to use less disk space without any loss in fidelity.
A perfect way to understand how it works is with the program Winzip. Imagine PCM as 10 individual Microsoft Word Documents. Now imagine 10 Word documents zipped into one Winzip file as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. 10 individual Word documents will take up more space on a computer hard drive, than 10 Word Documents zipped into one Winzip file. Despite the fact the Winzip file uses less space, there is no loss in the quality of the files making zipped files more efficient than individual files when it comes to space management. Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA work the same way.
There are two ways to hear the lossless audio codecs.
- You can get a blu-ray player that internally decodes Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. The player will then send the decoded codecs to your receiver as LPCM. A perfect player capable of this is the Playstation 3. You don’t need the latest and greatest receiver if you have a player that can internally decode the formats. As long as you have a receiver that can receive LPCM via HDMI, then you’re good to go.
- The other way is to use a transport player that streams both audio codecs directly to a receiver that can internally decode both audio codecs. A perfect player that can bitstream the audio codecs untouched directly to a receiver capable of decoding the audio formats is the Denon 2500 BTCI. They key thing to remember with a transport player is that it is not capable of doing any decoding. It simply sends the codecs untouched to your receiver. You must have an up to date receiver that is capable on decoding the codecs. The latest top of the line offerings from Denon, Onkyo, Yamaha and Pioneer can decode both audio codecs.
Only when you begin listening to lossless audio tracks in conjunction to viewing blu-ray on a 1080p display will you then be able to take advantage of what blu-ray has to offer.
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July 1st, 2008 at 7:59 pm
As long as you have a receiver that can receive LPCM via HDMI, then you’re good to go.
Question: Would a Harmon Kardon DPR 1001 meet the above requirements?
July 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 am
The Harmon Kardon DPR 1001 does not have any HDMI inputs, so no.
July 29th, 2008 at 11:16 am
Three questions:
Is there any difference in sound quality if the PS3 sends the decoded LPCM to a new reciever (Denon 4308 or Onkyo 875) or you send the bitstream info directly to one of these two recievers (i.e., do the recievers do a better job of decoding the audio then the PS3 does)?
Is HDMI the best connection between the PS3 and the reciever or is optical better for the audio signal?
If a Bluray disc indicates it has Lossless audio (PCM) or DTS-HD MA, will it automatically contain 7.1 channels or is it disc/movie specific (i.e., some will be 5.1 others may be 7.1)? If not, how much improvement are we really getting for adding two additional speakers and an expensive reciever?
July 29th, 2008 at 11:27 am
Hi Bob,
The sound quality should be the same whether the player (PS3 for example) does the internal decoding, of if the player bitstreams the audio codecs to the receiver to decode. It’s the same thing, just two different pathways to the same end result, lossless sound. As an aside, the PS3 cannot bitstream lossless audio. It internally decodes it.
HDMI is the best connection for the PS3. It is the only way to get multichannel lossless audio with the PS3. The required bandwidth is too much for optical.
5.1, 6.1 and 7.1 tracks are entirely up to how the movie studio mixed the film. There are some stellar 7.1 tracks out there. 3:10 To Yuma comes to mind. It’s 7.1 PCM and it sounds fantastic. Though obscure, 6.1 is also available. Movies like Crank and The Descent have 6.1 mixes. However, the vast majority of mixes are 5.1. The magnitude of the soundfield improvement is subjective. My opinion is that it adds to the immersion of the experience, but it’s not essential. Most people would be fine with 5.1.