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with a monolithic solution that would eventually stop being up-to-date when either the audio or video components became outdated.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.

Post from: EveryJoe

Digital audio buying tips

Due to the nature of human hearing, many subtleties of the content can be lost when listening at low audio levels. To address this problem, Dolby Volume continually analyzes the audio and properly balances low, middle, and high frequencies to maintain the nuances and impact of the program material regardless of playback volume.

Seriously, why didn’t anyone come up with this sooner? We’ve all been there at 3am in and out of sleep and then being awoken by a blaring commercial. Now then, if only they could license the technology into cable and satellite boxes without having to make us buy new TVs…

Read [Business Wire]

Via [EngadgetHD]

Post from: EveryJoe

Toshiba HDTVs New Feature: Auto Audio Leveling