High Fidelity Pure Audio - which Blueray players can play them?

[expat_mike]

The marketing push to get us interested in High Fidelity Pure Audio has started. I know that my Blueray player won't play them - does anyone know of any BDPs that will play them, or do we need to wait for firmware updates, or buy new BPDs?

 

[bigboss]

According to this news report, all existing blu ray players can play them:

http://www.whathifi.com/news/ultra-high-quality-audio-from-blu-ray-enters-the-mainstream

"Compatibility with any existing Blu-ray player or PS3 obviously gives HFPA an advantage over previous high-definition standards such as SACD."

 

[daveloc]

Although all HFPA discs should *play* on any BluRay player as BigBoss says, there may be issues with compulsory downsampling of optical and coaxial digital outputs preventing the use of existing audiophile DACs and forcing reliance on the player's internal conversion and analogue outs.

For example, although my Panny BDT500 can be set to output 96kHz PCM (which is the limit of SP/DIF), it will still downsample to 48kHz if the source is copy protected – which pretty much everything is – and in a number of other situations.

Although HDMI audio isn't necessarily affected by these limitations, few if any current audiophile DACs have HDMI inputs or handle non-PCM datastreams, so you would still typically need a multichannel AV amp to decode externally even for stereo source material in a stereo only system.

This may result in a chicken-and-egg situation: HFPA has to succeed to make it worth DAC-builders licensing the HDMI chipset, but you can't hear the full benefits of it till they do...

 

[expat_mike]

Thanks BB and daveloc.

I'm tempted to buy one disc, probably Supertramp, and use it as a test disc for my Blueray player. Maybe this would be an opportunity to try Flubit.

It's also interesting what daveloc says about the potential limitations of current BDPs for the HFPA format - I suspect it will take a while for the forum members to try the HFPA discs on a range of BDPs and provide feedback to the forum.

I imagine all the feedback will be via the HFPA thread in the HIFi section of the forum.

 

[manicm]

Although all HFPA discs should *play* on any BluRay player as BigBoss says, there may be issues with compulsory downsampling of optical and coaxial digital outputs preventing the use of existing audiophile DACs and forcing reliance on the player's internal conversion and analogue outs.

For example, although my Panny BDT500 can be set to output 96kHz PCM (which is the limit of SP/DIF), it will still downsample to 48kHz if the source is copy protected – which pretty much everything is – and in a number of other situations.

Although HDMI audio isn't necessarily affected by these limitations, few if any current audiophile DACs have HDMI inputs or handle non-PCM datastreams, so you would still typically need a multichannel AV amp to decode externally even for stereo source material in a stereo only system.

This may result in a chicken-and-egg situation: HFPA has to succeed to make it worth DAC-builders licensing the HDMI chipset, but you can't hear the full benefits of it till they do...

Hear what you're saying. But I didn't p*ss money down the drain on my CA751BD to hook it up to an external DAC to p*ss more - get what I'm saying? In case you're not, my guess is that for at least 80% 100% of Blu-ray players out there the built-in DACs should be fine. Unlike SACD, no additional decoders shoould be required to get the best out of them.

 

[Hubird]

I know this is an old topic but I could not see many threads on this topic.

Recently got myself Nirvana - Nevermind on HFPA, not sure if the audio quality is anything to rave about (more listenning required).

It was a stuff around to rip the tracks (I prefer to do my listening from the PC into my NAD M51 using JRiver).

Out of curiosity are any of the 2.0 tracks on these discs better than others, on this particular one we have:

2.0 PCM 24bit / 96Khz

2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio 24bit / 96Khz

2.0 Dolby TrueHD 24bit / 96Khz

Isn't one of the features of these discs that all the auido is losless and given that they are all 24bit / 96Khz they all should be the same.. Right?