Digital audio buying tips

I am currently in the market to buy a new home audio system, which presents a few problems for me.

In the past, I’ve been of the opinion that your audio equipment should be completely separate from your video equipment: the additional splitters used in the all-in-one home theater systems could cause noise and signal delay problems. In addition, you’d be stuck with a monolithic solution that would eventually stop being up-to-date when either the audio or video components became outdated. They should be separate and connected via S/PDIF, I always said.

For the most part, this was true, especially with DVDs. And if you bought an S-Video or component home theater kit, you’d be pretty out of luck with HDMI.

But, when Blu-ray comes along, it has a theoretical audio bitrate of 28 Mbps of raw audio, or up to nearly 19 and 25 Mbps for Dolby TrueHD Lossless and DTS HD, respectively.

The problem? Your S/PDIF line (either using an optical Toslink or coaxial RCA cable) only supports up to 3 Mbps, or so, and possibly less. The audio receivers that only support S/PDIF and analog inputs don’t stand a chance to understand the highest quality streams.

So, how does that audio get from your Blu-ray disc to the audio system? HDMI. This is also the video transport cable, so your home audio solution must be integrated with whatever video you are running as well. The days of separate audio and video receivers is over.

Thus, with a sad heart, I must buy a monolithic, all-in-one home theater package.