[quote user="MAVVY"]
[quote user="FuzzyinLondon"]Cars has a PCM 5.1 soundtrack which is awesome and is the best one to select as it is uncompressed. I don't see why you wouldn't just choose that given the option.[/quote]
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Hi guys.ÿ I have an excellent Arcam AVR300 multichannel amp (without HDMI passthrough, only component) and a 5.1 speaker set-up.ÿ It is unlikely in the foreseeable future that I will upgrade to 7.1 because of space constraints and I don't want to change the amp.ÿ I am considering purchasing the BD30 Blu-Ray player and sending the HDMI cable direct to the plasma TV.ÿ For audio I have the option of sending a digital coax to the amp for processing or 6 channel (5.1) analogue output to the Arcam Amp.ÿ I believe the analogue option is best because as FuzzyinLondon points out whilst not 'HD Audio' the data would be uncompressed.ÿ Would the coax option be uncompressed too?ÿ What would be the highest quality sound achieved throughÿeither method?ÿ DTS possibly?
[/quote]
Coaxial digital is incapable of handling the data requirements of high bitrate audio, such as Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD or multichannel PCM (it'll cope with stereo PCM no problem). For that reason, the optimum multichannel audio you'll get from coax will be so-called 'full-bitrate' DTS, running at 1536kbps. That's present on some DVDs, and will also be available from the SP/DIF output of the Panasonic BD player when used with appropriate Blu-ray software.
So, if you want to access less-compressed or uncompressed audio codecs, your best option is to decode them onboard the Panasonic and output them as multichannel analogue audio.