Taking the Blu-Ray plunge...

[admin_exported]

Hi I have been following developments regarding Blu-Ray with a great deal of interest and am seriously thinking about taking the plunge. Now my current equipment is a Meridian G91 player, G55 and G57 amps, G61 processor and a 42" Fujitsu Plasmavision (= non TV), and I have always been extremely pleased with the music and movie performance of my system which is terrific. To play Blu-Ray I know I will need to upgrade my plasma to HD. The questions are as follows: 1) Is there such a thing as a 42" HD plasma monitor out there (minus the tuner) as I don't watch TV and have no wish to do so - yes, people like me really do exist! 2) If I buy say the Panasonic BDP-30 player how will I gain the full benefit of HD sound? Can I simply hook up the analogue cables from the player to the G61 (this doesn't have any HDMI functionality as far as I can tell)? Or is there any other way, e.g. optical? I don't want to buy another processor, e.g. Onkyo. 3) Apparently the forthcoming Panasonic BDP-50 'decodes' HD sound, so should I wait for the new player? If I do will there be an easier way to get full HD sound, or is it too soon to say? Looking forward to the benefit of everyone's considerable knowledge and apologies for my ignorance of these things! Thanks

 

[professorhat]

Hi there

1. I don't know of any plasma monitors other than a 50" one Pioneer did a while back - not even sure if it's still available though. No 42" ones I know of though. This shouldn't be an issue though as, as long as you don't have the aerial connected, there's no way you can watch TV so you won't have to pay a TV license (if that's what you are worried about).

2 (& 3!). The Panasonic DMP-BD30 will give you HD sounds from some discs through the analogue outs. However, it can't decode Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio on board, so anything with only these soundtracks will be decoded to be their core DTS 5.1 or Dolby Digital mixes through the analogue outs so not lossless HD sound. I think the BD-50 will be able to decode everything and export them as PCM via the analogue outs so this will fit better with your existing sound system if you don't want to replace your amp. You can't use optical or coaxial digital as these connections don't have the bandwidth to cope with the new HD formats.

Hope this helps!

 

[Anonymous]

That's really helpful on all counts - thanks very much!!