Sony STR-DA2400ES AV amp upscaling

[admin_exported]

I have recently bought the Sony STR-DA2400ES AV amp and am very pleased with its performance. One of the devices attached to the amp is my Sky HD box - connected via HDMI cable for video, and optical cable for Dolby Digital audio. The DD audio from the Sky HD transmission is excellent. However, the Sony marketing material and tech specs for the STR-DA2400ES amp states ........I quote.......

Faroudja DCDi Cinema technology upscales all video sources so you can enjoy great picture quality from your standard DVD. .... and

Built-in upscaler generates a 1080p signal via HDMI™ cable giving you superb picture quality on your HD TV and minimising the number of connections needed

I cannot get the amp to upscale the Sky HD from its native 1080i to 1080p. The Sky resolution remains at 1080i. Whilst I may not be able to spot the difference anyway, I would like to solve the issue.

Has anyone managed to get Sky HD upscaled to 1080p please?

 

[Andrew Everard]

IIRC, and I'm working from home and thus don't have access to a receiver, the Sony only upconverts/upscales from analogue signals, not HDMI inputs.

If you wanted to try upscaling Sky HD to 1080p, you'd therefore have to input the video into the Sony receiver using a component video connection from Sky HD.

 

[Anonymous]

In any case, you may be better off letting your TV process 1080i signals. Some of the Faroudja chips aren't able to process 1080i using all of the per pixel motion adaptive trickery that they use for standard definition stuff. Instead they do field scaling. This pretty much means they take each alternate field (half frame) of 540 lines from the 1080i signal and draw each line twice. So in effect half of the resolution is thrown away, which is obviously bad. The good news is that most HDTVs do a pretty good job of deinterlacing 1080i. The long and the short of it is that you're probably not losing out by passing these signals through.

Just for reference, the per pixel motion adaptive business above is where the processor looks at several fields (VRS uses 5, I think HQV uses 4, not sure about DCDi) and examines the differences between them. It then assembles full 1080 line jaggie-free progressive frames using sophisticated interpolation.ÿ

One other thing about Sky HD. It won't output a 576i (interlaced) signal over HDMI, only 576p, 720p or 1080i. DCDi and comparable systems like HQV and VRS are designed to do a really good job of deinterlacing (along with cadence detection and detelecining if you want to get really technical) before scaling video to HD resolution. It's actually the cadence detection, detelecining and deinterlacing bit that the Sky HD box and many TVs get wrong, probably because this is the really hard part. By comparison the final scaling step is relatively easy. To get the best from the Faroudja chip, you should feed it a 576i (or 480i) signal. The best way to do that with your receiver is to use a component connection. Some people (me included) think that the component output on the Sky HD box is a bit soft compared to the HDMI output. But in my opinion that's a fair trade. In return I get a much cleaner picture. Try watching Bloomberg with each connection and you'll see exactly what I mean. Over 576p HDMI you'll see loads of combing in the tickers. 576i over component should look much better. Be sure to unplug the HDMI cable first or you'll find it outputs 576p over component too (at least the Thompson box does).

I'd be interested to know how you get on.

ÿ

 

[Andrew Everard]

Well, all that and the fact the receiver won't do it!

 

[Anonymous]

Hi Andrew,

Assuming you're still talking about 1080i HDMI > 1080p HDMI, I'm not surprised. It seems to be a pretty common limitation, even on much more expensive kit. Any idea why that's the case? If anything I'd have thought that HDMI to HDMI processing would be easier and cheaper to implement.

ÿ