New Toshiba A35 HD DVD Player

[deacongreg]

Originally Posted by kennyt

I can't fault you for waiting for the upgrade....

I might want to trade up to it myself, but for now I am kind of burnt on swapping out players for these new formats. I am on my fifth player of Blu-ray and HD DVD already.....

Wow, I guess that is what happens when you are an early adopter. You put yourself out there and to some degree are at the mercy of what happens in the early stages of something new. But, if the A35 has 1.3 and the new DVDO chip, output 1080p, that seems to be the one.

Now, if it could only play my Diana Krall DTS disc, or my Steely Dan and Isaac Hayes SACDs!!!

[tigeraudio2007]

The new A35 still does not support the DTS HD Master Audio format. Not bitstream and not decoding. What's with that? How hard can it be to incorporate that into the player. It plays normal DTS and DTS-HD HR (core only). DVD has Dolby Digital and DTS. Why can't the new players have those and TrueHD and DTS HD Master? I don't see what's so hard about that.

Instead it seems the players can do everything but straight passthrough the audio formats. Transcode it, decode it, re-encode it...but it won't pass it along uninterrupted. Seems like it takes more work to do all the mumbo jumbo inside the player than to just allow the DTS HD Master Audio to be passed to the receiver.

[JerryDelColliano]

Originally Posted by tigeraudio2007

The new A35 still does not support the DTS HD Master Audio format. Not bitstream and not decoding. What's with that? How hard can it be to incorporate that into the player. It plays normal DTS and DTS-HD HR (core only). DVD has Dolby Digital and DTS. Why can't the new players have those and TrueHD and DTS HD Master? I don't see what's so hard about that.

Instead it seems the players can do everything but straight passthrough the audio formats. Transcode it, decode it, re-encode it...but it won't pass it along uninterrupted. Seems like it takes more work to do all the mumbo jumbo inside the player than to just allow the DTS HD Master Audio to be passed to the receiver.

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Some people think that its better to have the player do the decoding for the newest and best surround formats.

Its redundant to have those processors on the player AND in the receiver or preamp.

I am not sure how I feel about this but I know a lot of people are thinking about that.

j

[tigeraudio2007]

I honestly don't care which comoponent does it. I guess I would prefer to have the receiver do it because generally you have more control over through the receiver than through the player.

My point though with the A35 is that the player doesn't have DTS HD Master Audio in it at all! We don't even get decoded PCM of the audio format. Nor do we get bitstream. SOL when it comes to that format on HD DVD!

Not that it makes all the difference in the world if you are given a PCM or TrueHD version. But when HD DVDs are mainly saddled with DD+ at 1.5Mbps if you are lucky, it is really annoying knowing that these uncompressed formats are sitting out there and not being used.

[JerryDelColliano]

You would care if you had a $24,000 AV preamp like KennyT and I...

I want to be able to plug it right into my Meridian and have it work.

j

[tigeraudio2007]

Oh...well, excuse me. I guess great audio quality can't come out of my $1,000 Onkyo receiver.

Don't we all just want to plug it in and have it work? Good luck with that. Nothing is seemingly built to be plugged in and work anymore. Consumers are now the ultimate beta testers for life.