I've been wondering about compatibility of today's receivers, and having recently read a great article from dolby people in widescreen review (nov 2005), here is how I understand the situation (and please tell me what I am missing or get wrong!):
the dolby people actually prefer for the player to do all the decoding and 'mixing', unlike in today's situation where sending bitstream is the preferred method.
If you have spdif or optical connection on the receiver, the player will re-encode the dolby digital bitstream. You won't get the highest quality level, but because of the higher transfer rate than ordinary dvd, it will still sound better.
If you have analog inputs (just like for SACD and DVD-Audio), you can get the full quality of the new codecs, provided you get a player with full range of outputs, using the player's processing and d/a conversion. You'd have to make sure that the player does bass management, speaker set ups and all that good stuff. The major downside to this (aside from having to deal with 6 or 8 cables), is that since you're bypassing your receiver's processing, you won't have access to any of receiver's special functions like post processing (thx, dolby pro logic IIx), etc.
If you have an hdmi 1.1 input, then you've got it really good! The player will decode, mix and convert everything to pcm channels which then can be output via hdmi keeping everything in the digital sphere. The receiver then can take those pcm tracks and apply bass management, post processing and d/a conversion. The dolby people seemed to emphasize that this was the preferred method, because that way the processor could 'focus' on doing processor intensive stuff like post processing. My only problem with this scenario is that hdmi 1.1 doesn't pass 1080p video (I think?), so what will happen when you want to pass 1080p video and pcm audio tracks? It seems to me that if you don't want to lose quality, you'll need player that will have two hdmi outputs, one for receiver, one for display.
Finally, if you really want the receiver to do everything, including decoding, the way they do it now for dvds, you need to wait till hdmi 1.3, in which case you'll be able to send lossless bitstream (and 1080p video) via hdmi for receiver to do all the work.
Although this is all going to be happening in the brave new world of 7.1 audio, my impression from that article and from everything else I read that they will strongly support 5.1 all the way.
Ok... have I got everything right? what am I missing?
Since I'll never go to 7.1 as long as I am living in my current townhouse (there''s just no room for two more speakers), support for 5.1 was music to my years. And if what I say is right, I should be in no hurry to upgrade from my six year old Marantz SR-18!
Stan
