Bluray Player decodes atmos or receiver?

[Grymlot]

Hey all,

I have an old cheap blu ray player and now that I'm building a dedicated home theater room I thought I should upgrade a bit to ensure I am compatible with the latest technologies. However, I am not finding alot of blu ray players that say they support Atmos in the $1-200 price range. I saw people talking about using the bitstream setting to let the receiver decode the atmos. Is this common or does the blu ray player typically handle the atmos? Am I losing anything here?

If anyone has suggestions for blu ray players, that is welcome also. My projector does not support dolby vision, is upscaled 4k (jmgo n1s ultra), but I am going for a 5.1.4 sound setup and looking to spend less than $200 since I will be using steaming services much more often than blu rays.

 

[TLS Guy]

Hey all,

I have an old cheap blu ray player and now that I'm building a dedicated home theater room I thought I should upgrade a bit to ensure I am compatible with the latest technologies. However, I am not finding alot of blu ray players that say they support Atmos in the $1-200 price range. I saw people talking about using the bitstream setting to let the receiver decode the atmos. Is this common or does the blu ray player typically handle the atmos? Am I losing anything here?

If anyone has suggestions for blu ray players, that is welcome also. My projector does not support dolby vision, is upscaled 4k (jmgo n1s ultra), but I am going for a 5.1.4 sound setup and looking to spend less than $200 since I will be using steaming services much more often than blu rays.

No, you need a BD player that can read an Atmos disc, and then the receiver can decode it, if it is an Atmos AVR or AVP.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I would think that you absolutely must have the receiver deal with Atmos as the receiver knows where the speakers are in the room.

I don't know if any standard BD players support Atmos. The newer UHD discs/players appear to support this and are available for around $200. The Sony players clearly advertise this feature...

https://electronics.sony.com/c/4k-ultra-hd-blu-ray-disc-players

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

Any decent bd player nowadays can send the Atmos track. The player has to be set to bitstream so the AVR can decode it. Selecting PCM output doesn’t work.

 

[j_garcia]

Most players these days don't have analog outputs anymore due to copyright legalities, so that would mean if you were to buy a player today, the AVR is almost certainly going to be doing the decoding.

Not to mention, I don't think there was ever a player that had more than 7.1 analog outputs.

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

Most players these days don't have analog outputs anymore due to copyright legalities, so that would mean if you were to buy a player today, the AVR is almost certainly going to be doing the decoding.

Not to mention, I don't think there was ever a player that had more than 7.1 analog outputs.

Also the metadata present in an Atmos track doesn’t get passed along in pcm. The only way the AVR knows what to do with it is when it’s sent via bitstream. All of the sounds are present, but the locational data can only be unpacked via bitstream.



In short, the only way for Atmos to work, is to send bitstream to the AVR for decoding.

 

[Trebdp83]

I can't think of a stand alone disc player that supports Dolby MAT for metadata transmission over LPCM so it must be set to bitstream. Though, some Dolby MAT equipped streamers can send Atmos metadata over LPCM.

If a disc with a Dolby Atmos track is played and the signal set to bitstream, a receiver that does NOT support Dolby Atmos will simply decode the Dolby TrueHD track sans metadata.