HD Audio

[admin_exported]

Two questions for you people in the know. Firstly I have a ps3 connected to a Onkyo 875 reciever and after the latest firmware update I was wondering what to set the reciever at.

Have you got to set it on multi channel or can you have it set as just dts. I ask this as the ps3 might be sending dts hd at 4-5 mbs will the reciever still output this at 4-5mbs set at dts or will it convert it back to 4-5 hundred kbs.

Second question with the new hd audio will a blu ray disk of say celine dion sound better played through the ps3 or will a normal cd played on a cambridge audio 640 v2 be better.

I have not tried this as I dont want to spend money on a blu ray music disk to get it home and it to sound awful.

 

[professorhat]

Receiver should be set to accept PCM multichannel as this is all the PS3 is exporting as it decodes all the formats onboard. I'm pretty sure you'll be better off with you standard CD player as the PS3 isn't a brilliant CD player on its own.

 

[Anonymous]

Cheers for the reply but still not totally happy. If the reciever is set to dts or thx surley it would not be able to cut the bit rate it is recieving from the ps3. (I think) All it would be doing is processing the sound field and leaving the high bit rate it recieves alone.

And with the ps3 playing a blu ray music disc even with a picture it would have a clearer sound if it was sent to the reciever PCM stereo or 5.1 for that matter.

 

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

You definitely want to be using PCM on the PS3. The bit rate you see for say DTS-HD Master Audio on the PS3 is the compressed bit-rate being read from the disc.

If we really must take Celine Dion as an example (only kidding!) then on her Blu-ray disc the audio is encoded in TrueHD at 96KHz, 24-bit. The PS3 turns that back into fixed rate PCM audio to send to your receiver as multi-channel PCM at a whopping great 13.8mbps. Stereo PCM which is what you get from a CD turns in about 1.4mbps. So in theory there is much more potential information on the Blu-ray disc than the CD.

As ever, which sounds better will depend somewhat on your kit, and the quality of the individual recording. Assuming that the CD and Blu-ray are recorded to equally high standards, then the Blu-ray ought to have the ability to knock a CD of the same music off it's socks.

Ignore any rubbish about PCM audio not really being HD audio, this is pure garbage. Anything that gets encoded in either Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD Master Audio started off as a PCM track in the first place. TrueHD and DTS-HD merely compress that PCM track to take up less space on disc and then uncompress it just like a zip file to re-create what you started with bit-for-bit. PCM audio on Blu-ray is as HD as it gets, just rather space and bandwith hungry.

Buy the Celine Dion Blu-ray and enjoy it. If you're a fan I suspect you'll be very happy.

 

[professorhat]

Sorry, yes, I misread your post - my reply on the CD playback for the PS3 was for standard CDs. I've never heard of a Blu-Ray music disc (unless your talking about a Blu-Ray video disc of a concert or something?)...

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the replies and judging by the answers blu ray could finish off DVD and CD in the near future.

 

[Anonymous]

If the marketing is to be believed (ahem....) then both High definition audio formats (DD & DTS) are lossless. What then, is the point of the two formats? Any discernable difference? Just how much more lossless could they be?