M500 Audio Clarification

[cinelife]

Having received numerous emails and telephone calls regarding the M500's lack of decoding the HD codecs (DolbyTrueHD and DTS MA) I'm posting to remind people that the M500 will "Bitstream" (pass-through the undecoded audio) to your Receiver or PrePro for processing. Assuming your component is capable of internally decoding the stream (most newer Receivers, and some PrePro's are capable), you will have HD BR audio.

I know most here understand this, but apparently many do not. Those complaining about the lack of internal HD decoding (justifiably) have either older components, or components that for some reason lack the ability to accept/decode a bitstream signal.

Once the signal is decoded, whether that happens inside the Player or inside the Receiver, the result is the same, you will have HD BR audio.

There is nothing "wrong" with the M500's audio. It just would have been more convenient if the Player internally decoded the HD codecs, especially for those (myself included) that own PrePro's/Receiver's that do not have internal HD decoding capability. (I still upgrading my Players to the M-Class!)


Jim

 

[JerryL]

Thanks Jim. I agree and would say there is nothing apparently "wrong" with the new players but one should check their equipment rather than assuming.

 

[cinelife]

Absolutely!

I only posted because some owners had the impression the Players would not support the HD audio at all. I guess depending on how you define "support," that would be accurate. I wanted to be clear that the Players do "support" HD in the sense they can bitstream the audio to decoding Receivers/Prepros.

Jim

 

[JerryL]

Correct. For the sake of anyone who is new to this stuff "bitstream"= the audio is sent to your receiver or surround processor in its native format for it to be decoded and then processed. Whereas many players can do the decoding inside them and then they send the decoded (but still digital) audio to a receiver or processor in "PCM" format. This last thing is what the K players do not do, and hence the place where some of us have gripes.

 

[rbienstock]

Correct. For the sake of anyone who is new to this stuff "bitstream"= the audio is sent to your receiver or surround processor in its native format for it to be decoded and then processed. Whereas many players can do the decoding inside them and then they send the decoded (but still digital) audio to a receiver or processor in "PCM" format. This last thing is what the K players do not do, and hence the place where some of us have gripes.

Right, and if you want a piece of delicious irony, when BR became the dominant HD disk format, one if the big things it had going for it was that at that time most BR disks had multi-channel uncompressed PCM soundtracks, which was touted as being superior to HD-DVD which only supported the various Dolby and DTS flavors of lossless compression. Moreover, if you went to any of the forums dedicated to Lexicon or Meridian processors, there was a lot of bitching there, quite similar to what is happening here, about the fact that these high-end processors couldn't decode the lossless formats natively. The manufacturers offered a bunch of reasons why, primary among them the requirement for frequent software updates that are best done in the player. Also, given that the advanced CODECs are truly lossless, there should be no difference between the PCM and the lossless stream, so issues like cabling come into play, and there are advantages to doing decoding in the player because the ways to fix bad LPCM streams (reclocking, etc.) are by now well understood. The reason why all players and even the cheapest A/V receivers can do this decoding is because it is baked in to the ICs that they use for BR playback, so adding this feature is trivial. But if you are going to build your own custom decoding engine (which all the high-end pre-pros do with the lossy formats), that is hard, so they've deferred that to the next model cycle, just as Kaleidescape has done. The second irony is that just like Kaleidescape never imagined that there were pre-pros that couldn't decode these formats, Lexicon, Meridian, etc. never imagined that there could be a situation where this mattered because until the M-Series, every other player out there could decode the lossless CODECs internally.

 

[Mars]

Additionally, some of us dropped a chunk of change on pre/pros a few years ago (before decoding these formats were part of the standard setup) and don't want to upgrade our pre/pro just for this.

 

[JerryL]

Agreed on both counts. The bottom line IMHO is this is not an issue of "fault" but rather I consider it to be a shame that the new players dont decode internally, however, it does not mean for anyone reading this that the new players are not compatible with the high res formats in terms of being able to read that data and then send it along to one's audio system (so long as that system supports it).

 

[brodricj]

I have just read the Kaleidescape Technical Note TN-009 and it says (on page 2) the M-Class players support Linear PCM up to 7.1. So I take it that if the original BR disc audio is LPCM 7.1 then you will get the full lossless audio experience of that movie from your M-Class player.

 

[JerryL]

That makes sense because the issue we have here is with internal decoding- so if a disc has the sound already in this format then you'd be fine. The player is just passing it along.