Another Receiver Question?

[Stereoguy]

I'm trying to decide whether to buy a new receiver( Pioneer Elite 91,Yamaha RXV1800 ,) w/Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD Master Audio,etc built-in or have the processing done by the dvd player? In the past the processing done in the receiver was totally superior(I tried both and found the dvd players decoder inferior)is it still the same with the newer technology.Thanks for the help.

 

[MDS]

Some of the newer HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players have the abililty to send the data as a bitstream to allow the receiver to do the decoding but most of the prior models do not. So, it's really a moot point.

Regardless of whether the format is one of the new lossless formats or DD/DTS the receiver isn't necessarily 'superior' in decoding as it will likely use the exact same chip as the player. The advantage of having the receiver do the decoding is that it gets the data and can then do anything it wants to it (like say use the PLIIx decoder to turn 5.1 into 7.1). Other than that there should be no difference in sound quality unless the DACS of the player are woefully worse than the DACS in the receiver.

So you should buy a new receiver if it offers more processing features that you want but not so much because it can decode certain formats instead of requiring the dvd player to do it.