Dolby TrueHD Reviewed
Dolby TrueHD is coming!
Personally I think that the format war between SACD and DVD-Audio will be won by Dolby TrueHD. There’s nothing stopping studios from putting out music albums on HD DVD or BD in TrueHD surround. (Actually, studios will probably wait for a winner, then release on that.) Since there is bound to be a clear winner between HD DVD and BD, unlike the SACD / DVD-Audio situation, there will be one clear choice. So anybody with a next-gen disc player will be able to listen to up to 7.1 channels of studio master quality sound. How do you beat that?
And you can listen to it today. Toshiba has issued a firmware fix for their HD DVD players that’ll allow those players to play back TrueHD soundtracks. High Def Digest takes a look at TrueHD and the four Warner titles that support it. It’s quite an interesting read.
One thing that puzzles me though is that they say that you can listen to the TrueHD surround track using the HDMI output. I don’t think that’s true. Only HDMI 1.3 supports Dolby TrueHD and I’m pretty sure that the Toshiba decks aren’t HDMI 1.3. But you can still use the analog outputs to enjoy the high resolution Dolby TrueHD soundtracks. (Unfortunately, TrueHD supports up to 7.1 audio, while the player only has 5.1 analog audio outputs.)
Enjoy!
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August 30th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
The player will decode TrueHD internally and send it out via PCM with HDMI 1.1 or better. So technically TrueHD over HDMI is possible without 1.3. HDMI 1.3 is only necessary to decode internally in the receiver.
August 30th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Thanks for the clarification. Will the PCM be the same resolution as the TrueHD stream? What is the PCM? 24 bit /96 kHz? What is the TrueHD?
August 30th, 2006 at 4:34 pm
Will not DTS HD Master be better?
August 30th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Maybe, maybe not. This is the closest I could find:
http://www.docdvd.com/editorial.htm
Both are up to 18 Mbps. TrueHD is up to 7.1 channels of 24bit / 96kHz audio. DTS-HD Master is 7.1 channels of 24bit / 192 kHz. But DTS didn’t publish that spec, so it’s up in the air.