HD-A3 audio output question

[Romulus]

I am setting up my whole system and have a question regarding the audio output of the A3.. following the recommendation of the articles on this site, I went in my dvd player setup and set the output to bitstream on spdif, but under HDMI output it only offers "auto", "pcm", or "downmixed pcm." I played a movie recorded in DD5.1 and the receiver (yammy 2700) said it was being fed PCM audio and outputting multi channel PCM sound.

Is there no way to have Dolby Digital sound with the A3 via HDMI?

edit: flipping through the A3 manual, I found this..

[under Digital HDMI Output menu]
"Select Auto when an HDMI device equipped with built-in DD, DTS, MPEG, or linear PCM decoder is connected to this player.
When you play a disc recorded in Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD, PCM is output (core only for DTS-HD)
When you play a disc recorded in Dolby Digital or DTS format, digital audio signal (bitstream audio) is output. If a connected HDMI device does not support Dolby Digital, DTS, or MPEG, sound is converted into linear PCM to output."

So what am I doing wrong?

 

[Romulus]

Update:

I tried a few dvd's. The first, which I was referencing in my first post, was the HD-DVD of phantom of the opera. The receiver was being fed and outputting PCM sound. I switched to another dvd, Mariah Carey's life performance, and the receiver output DD sound. A third dvd was recorded in DD, but output MPCM.

I didn't change any settings between switching disks. What gives?

 

[Johnd]

I didn't change any settings between switching disks. What gives?

It's in the manual Romulus.

The A3 will output TrueDD via hdmi only, and DD for other formats (no DTS).

 

[Romulus]

Perhaps I'm confusing terms..

Since it's supposed to output DD via HDMI, why does the receiver say MPCM when I play DD recorded DVDs? If this won't make a hill of beans difference in sound, please say so From reading several writeups, it seems the goal is to avoid PCM and use the digital recording format when able.

 

[Alamar]

Multi-Channel PCM is a loseless format so you shouldn't lose a single thing in using that.

IIRC as long as all of your equipment supports HDMI 1.1 then there's no real reason why you'd want to pass DD, Dolby TruHD [sp??], etc. to the receiver. Actually passing those signals to the reciever MIGHT actually cause problems.

Of course the above assumes that the HD-A3 is handling the conversion properly and that your receiver handles Multi-Channel PCM properly but I suspect both units are up-to-snuff. YMMV