I've got a decent Panasonic amp, but it's about 6 years old & it doesn't decode DTS. I've recently gone Blu-ray and two DVDs I've bought (Wall-E & Sunshine) don't have Dolby 5.1 tracks, only DTS.

I know I can work around this and get faux surround by setting to PCM, but at the back of your mind you know you're missing out don't you!? To be frank it's pissing me off royally - I mean, why not just put a 5.1 track on the disc as well?

I like my set-up as it is, and my Panny has served me well. Plus I really don't want to open the wallet if I don't have to. But, do you think this is going to be more and more of a problem in the future? Is it time to upgrade?

Any views gratefully received!

Does your Panasonic amp have the analogue inputs?
If it does ,then check to see if your player has analogue outputs and you might not need a new amp.

But you should be able to get an amp for under £300

Either way you need to do something

All Fox discs only carry 5.1 in DTS.

And there are others too

Thanks. I'm not sure exactly what you mean re: the analogue in/out so I'll study the manuals tonight.

Saw a half decent Yamaha on Richer Sounds for only £150 which I think would do the trick - although the Wall-E disc seems to have some issues with regard to DTS 5.1 -v- DTS-HD. The Yamaha might not decode it, I'm not sure yet though.

I'll look into it some more, and maybe clear it with the Treasury!

If you have blu ray as you may know you should get an amp which can do HD audio over HDMI.

The The Sony STR-DG520 looks good but ive read its a bit hard to find now but its on this site

http://www.superfi.co.uk/index.cfm/p...roduct_ID/5004

Aslo if you can spend a bit more the ONKYO TXSR606 would be great and can do HD audio.

If he is bothered about HD audio then he needs one with an HDMI input but that amp you have linked to does not do HD audio

If he is happy with standard 5.1 then his current amp would suffice or a new cheaper one like your link for the DTS.

Re analogue inputs: what is your BD player? If it has onboard HD decoding then a set of analogue outputs will be designed for giving you HD audio without an HDMI input.
Of course your amp needs the analogue inputs for it to work.
Many don't have them .
Mine does and I used to use it for SACD.

Unfortunately my BD30 player has analogue outputs but no onboard decoding for HD audio - but it would give you DTS in the OP situation

Oh yes sorry about that.
It should of been a link to this one

SONY STRDG820

http://www.superfi.co.uk/index.cfm/p...roduct_ID/4448

Got them mixed up.

Thats not bad.
I've not looked at prices for HD amps yet and I thought they were dearer than that so I might get one sooner than I thought.

I assume they can downmix 7.1 for my 6.1 setup as I have no room for an 8th speaker

Cheers for the input. I'm not bothered about HD audio & I'm happy with standard 5.1. I've no plans to switch to 6.1 in the foreseeable future.

All I'm worried about is that those 2 DVDs I've recently bought won't give me 5.1 through my current amp, the best I can seem to get is pro-logic with mono on the rears. I'm concerned that this might become more and more common on newer releases.

From what josephcavor said 20thC Fox do not put DD5.1 on their blu-ray releases, only DTS. Wall-E seems to be a different matter - think it's only got a DTS-E track? In which case don't think the Yamaha I linked to would decode it, but there might be a work around.

All I really want is to be able to buy a blu-ray disc without worrying about whether or not I'll be able to play it in 5.1. I want to spend as little as possible sorting this issue (ie absolutely has to be sub £200) Would the Yamaha cut it?

Ta

With the amp offering HD audio at only £244 it would be wasteful to spend £200 on a non HD one.

The incorrect link to the £150 amp will do your DTS for you but unless you are really strapped for cash its not a good idea to buy a non HD amp now if you already have Bluray

Watched Slumdog Millionaire Bluray today and that has only DTS aswell (for the movie)

If you are a 007 fan you might like to know that the US discs carry 7.1 in DTS but they do have the original audio (anything from mono to standard surround) in DD.

Unfortunately as the UK ones have too many foreign audio tracks they dont carry the DD track and only have English sound in DTS

The US discs are Region A only but the UK ones are region free

Sorry, meant to add...

BD player is Sharp BD-HP21H

Current amp is Panasonic SA-HE7

Yamaha I was looking at is Richer Sounds

Thanks Joseph, you posted as I was typing my last one out. I think your last post sums everything up, and tells me what I need to know...unless you've got a view on the Yamaha I linked to?

Cheers

Personally , if you can stretch to £200 then the extra £44 to get HD audio is worth it.

If the cash is a problem then the amp listed is a decent one.

Note that Sky HD does not deliver 5. 1 audio via HDMI so you still need an optical connection for that.

The Sony is actually a 6.1 setup so you can enjoy DD-EX and DTS-ES with an additional rear speaker if you have the room

Sorry, a bit late to this thread, but I have to totally disagree. Now is exactly the wrong time to be upgrading for any kind of amplifier/AVR based bitstream decoding.

Inherent in the design of Blu-ray is the idea that the player should decode all the audio and pass multi-channel PCM to the player. This is so the player can mix audio from multiple sources eg. main audio, button sounds, picture-in-picture commentary track. It cannot do this if it is passing an encoded DTS soundtrack. HD audio tracks on Blu-ray are anyway lossless . By definition there is only one correct way to decode them, they are like zip files in the computer world. if a zip file with a program in it was incorrectly unpacked by even one bit the program would not work. Well it is kind of the same with HD audio. The same audio decoded in the player or the amp will sound the same. It is all in the digital domain there is no room for the amp to do a better job because of "better components" etc. and there is only one way to do it "right".

Bitstream support has been included because AVR manufacturers do not want their products devalued and, it has to be said, because some purists do not want any chance that the player might mess with the sound, but in reality it will not make a jot of difference.

There are other reasons to upgrade - HDMI inputs/outputs for example. Without these, you either have to go analogue from your player (as already mentioned), which will probably have inferior digital to analogue conversion, or all HD audio will need to be downmixed to Dolby Digital which will result in theoretical quality loss. However, downmixed DD will use "full bit rate" 640kb/s, much higher than the 448kb/s (max) and 384kb/s (quite common) bit rate used on DVD and better than even 1.5mb/s full bit-rate (original, non-HD) DTS (which uses an older compression algorithm). People can argue whether 448kb/s DD sounds better or worse than 1.5mb/s DTS on DVD, but @640kb/s DD is pretty much unarguably significantly better than any DVD-quality audio. Well people will argue about anything, but you get the point! It is highly unlikely that you will get noticeably better sound using HD audio (multi-channel PCM or bitstreamed) out of a £200 amp and probably similarly spec'd speakers than from a nice 640kb/s downmixed version of that track fed over s/pdif. It will probably be a bit different and you may notice that, but it will not be better.

So, in summary. The premise of the question is wrong. Maybe there was a time 7 or 8 years ago, when upgrading an amp for DTS support would have seemed a good idea, but now with HD audio decoding in the player it is not needed.

IMHO upgrade certainly if you want HDMI switching, but @£200 don't expect better audio quality from HD audio than full bit-rate DD over s/pdif. Don't pay anything to decode HD audio in your amp if it can do multi-channel PCM over HDMI. At this price level spend the money, if you have it, on an amp with better core capability (raw sound quality).

And, be careful you are not getting worse digital to analogue conversion - the most important role and delicate stage for any amp. You say you have an existing "decent" Panasonic amp. I do not know what model or what you mean by decent, but do not trade a good old amp, with a great digital to analogue stage for a cheap new amp with lots of great tick list items on the spec sheet!

The Yamaha you cite won't decode Dolby Digital. While many standard DVD Video titles do offer DTS, almost all of the modern titles offer Dolby Digital. So I would dismiss it on that fact alone.

Feel free to ignore my previous post. Teach me to send them in the arly hours of the morning. I had completely missed that some players cannot decode DTS and so can only send it out over s/pdif or HDMI.

I would still say do not get hung up on HD audio format decoding though. Better to make sure it does the basics well.

Of course it will.

There's no amp on the market that will decode DTS and not Dolby Digital

All the amps linked in this thread have the Dolby logo on the front

^^ Thanks Joseph, I thought I was going mad for a moment there! When someone posts so authoritatively you start to doubt yourself!

Jong, that was a useful post - thanks. It was a bit above my level technically but I just about followed it.

Can I ask what is probably a really dumb question? My BD player only has one HDMI socket, but presumably you need an HDMI connection to both the amp and the TV. How does this work...do you connect HDMI to the amp and then an HDMI out from the amp to the TV?

Presumably this is why current amps are saying they're 1080p, which I couldn't really understand given amps are audio & 1080p is visual. They need the capacity to pass it over to the telly. Is that right?

The idea with HDMI is that all your HDMI devices get connected to the amp then the amp gets connected to the tv so make sure the amp you get has at least 3 HDMI inputs for Sky HD ,Bluray and one spare.
Amps have had video connections for years but when they used scart there was always a loss of quality which is why I never connected an amp to my tv .

Theoretically the HDMI connection should show no drop in quality

Cheers, that makes sense now.

One last thing, honest.

If you run your BD HDMI through the amp then out to the TV does that mean that every DVD you play has to run the sound through the amp and out the surround speakers? Reason I ask is the when I'm putting on Peppa Pig etc for the kids I don't feel the need turn the amp on, I just play the sound through the TV. I normally just use the amp for Saturday Night Movie Night™!

Yep, it's impossible to have both amp audio and TV audio. For a start, it would be a waste of amp to send it stereo, and the TV would be nonplussed by DTS-MA! So the amp takes the audio stream off the HDMI and outputs just video. Some amps you can set to output audio, but this switches off their own decoding.

Read the specifications. No mention of DD there. However, deeper investigation shows that I am mistaken. The logo in the photographs isn't very clear.

Because of that lack of clarity, I would have dismissed it and not thought twice about it. Bad marketing by RS - which is unusual.

All BD devices I've used make you select sound from one output or the other - you cant have both

This applies to the PS3 aswell as the Sony and Panasonic players I've used

Regardless of logos I would have thought that you would have realised that nobody will market an amp that does not decode Dolby Digital.
Even those that do Dolby TruHD will downmix it to DD

If an amp does not decode dolby true hd and dts master will it accept audio over hdmi from a bd player.
The s350 will decode true hd but not dts master.
Will the amp then output true hd but only standard dts.
And what would be needed for this to happen.
This would appear to be a compromise for those not able to afford full decoding amps.
The question always is would it be better to obtain a good amp with dd & dts only and which may provide better sound quality without true hd or dtd master.
At the lower end of the market would we hear a difference.

All depends on the amp - some will only do video passthrough via HDMI, the audio has to be sourced from optical/coaxial.

If the amp carries audio over HDMI then it needs to be multichannel PCM compatible for it to out put HD audio.


I'm not familiar with the 350 but if it can't decode DTS HD MA then the core of the DTS track will be played.

There is speculation this will be added via an update.

I would have to say it's the quality of the speakers that makes the biggest impression to whether the listener can hear a difference between DD5.1/DTS and the newer HD audio formats - not the decoders.

Even the Sony STRDG820 hooked up to some good quality speakers will give the desired affect, but then I can't see anyone spending £250 on a receiver then spending £1000+ on speakers.