OK,

I am totally confused. How does decoding of the new Lossless DOlby Dig or Dolby Dig Plus work? Say I get an HD-DVD player, and I get the new batman HD-DVD, which has Lossless Dolby Dig, can I stillplay that through my Yamaha 7.1 reciever while taking advantage of the newest audio options? Can someone explain to me what I need to get to take advantage fully of these new audio streams being offered on HD-DVDs...

Thanks

The Toshiba has the ability to decode the DD+ or TrueHD signal and pass it as PCM over the HDMI or the six channel analog. As long as your receiver has one of those two options you get the advantage of DD+ and TrueHD without having to have the decoder for them built into the receiver.

Most of us are using the 6 channel analog out to our receivers.

what about Lossless? Does that require a new reciever? With the Xbox- HD-DVD player add on, the only thing available for output is Toslink, so does that mean i could only get the normal Dolby Dig/DTS?

The HD DVD 360 Add-on can not output lossless audio because there are no analog outs and no hdmi.

The Toshiba player can decode the lossless TrueHD so you will get that out to your receiver through either HDMI or 6 channel analog. The Toshiba doesn't support the DTS-HD decoding yet though.

For the Xbox360 add on you are out of luck for lossless sound though. It has no way to pass this signal or even decode it and pass the PCM so you will be limited to full bitstream DTS over the optical out. If its like the Toshiba player it will decode the DD+ and output it as DTS.

so it can output Dolby Dig Plus, and the reciever just processes it as full stream DTS, which I guess is better than nothing right?

OK, I have a dumb question. I'm inching ever so close to buying one of these fancy Toshiba HD-DVD players... can you still watch an HD-DVD movie with traditional DD5.1 and/or DTS? If you have an old receiver? I assume so but I haven't read much about it and everyone is talking about the new formats like the TrueHD, etc.

Just what was said above. The players have 3 options:

1) Decode DD+/TrueHD and output it as PCM on HDMI
2) Decode and output DTS on optical
3) Decode and output analog on analog 5.1 output (the Panasonic has 7.1 output)

The PS3 and Toshiba XA2 will add a fourth, but it isn't available yet:
4) NOT decode, and just output unaltered DD+/TrueHD over HDMI

If any of these will work with your current equipment, you'll be fine. Certainly the DTS via optical should be an option to most people.

ok, so i finally got my HD-DVD drive for the xbox... When I play it, the reciever only says Dolby Digital... Sounds good, but I was kinda expecting more... I would think it would have said DTS for full stream. I am watching King Kong, which has Dolby Digital Plus.... any help/ideas?

The 360 player cannot decode DD+, TrueHD, or DTS MA. The best you can get is DD through the optical connection.

Untrue.

From a developer on the Xbox team at http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-day.aspx, the Xbox 360 can decode:

Dolby Digital+, DTS, TrueHD, LPCM, MPEG

The reason why it shows up as Dolby Digital on your receiver is because the Xbox re-encodes the selected audiostream to include additional sounds like the Dashboard menus (whoosh). It is then outputted as DD via optical.

Users on AVS have reported that despite the re-encoding process, the soundtracks still sound better than their plain DVD equivalents.

We had a debate about DD+ some time back and it turns out that DD and DD+ are pretty much the same thing, despite the claims of some to the contrary. Some studios encode DD+ at higher bitrates than is typical for DD on Standard DVDs, but that is the main advantage of DD+ on HD DVD versus DD on SD DVD. DD+ can sound quite good, however and should not be dismissed as subpar or anything.

Having the Xbox player output DD+ as DD should be good enough (again, it's essentially the same thing) until you can someday buy a standalone player that can handle lossless audio.