Relationship between the new HD audio formats and HDMI 1.3
Or: the veil falls again?
Now, as so many times lately, things have started again with the multis (for economic reasons) catching on again. In this case, we are thinking specifically of the HDMI standard and the new generation of formats - Blu-ray and HD DVD. Remember: how many versions of HDMI have been released? Or can we really state, especially in the case of BD, that these standards can be considered final?
As the attached news and information show, nowhere near. Last summer, we first wrote about the HDMI 1.3 standard, where we also highlighted the main innovations. Changes to image transmission are not so important in our opinion, as HD displays need to evolve a lot to take advantage of them.
However, from the point of view of sound experiences, the situation is a little different. For a few months now, major manufacturers have been thinking that a home theater amplifier that doesn't have HDMI 1.3 or a DSP capable of encoding the built-in HD audio formats on board is worth nothing. However, now it turns out: this thing is not really so.
Physical realization
The next generation — or the current one? — optical-based HD formats can store audio tracks in two ways: basic and advanced Basic does not need to be explained, it is a solution based on linearity, which can also be found on DVDs. Advanced is already much more complicated, with the help of which publishers can implement various extras, since the audio material is mixed by the player itself from given tracks. (To understand better: for example, we can set in the menu that we want to hear the director's commentary and the "original" sound of the film at the same time. The point here is that this mix is not recorded on a separate soundtrack, but is mixed by the player itself in real time. )
And why is all this so important to us? Until now, Blu-ray releases have included audio tracks in basic mode, meaning that audio can be extracted in bitstream form with the help of suitable players, so that it can be processed by an amplifier with HD decoders according to our settings. However, it is expected that from next year, the BDA will also switch to advanced encoding - as HD DVD has done from the beginning - and from now on the HD audio capabilities of the new amplifiers will become virtually meaningless. That is, in this case, it will be sufficient to use AVRs with HDMI 1.2 if you set the source side to output multi-channel LPCM audio (5.1 or 7.1 PCM), which also means lossless compression like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, so in theory we don't have to worry about quality degradation (of course, the decisive factor here will be the decoder built into the player).
A real cannon from the latest camp (Onkyo TX-SR905)
Approaching this news from the end user's point of view, we can take this news as a positive rather than to shut up, since anyone who already has a home theater amplifier with HDMI 1.2 - or perhaps a processor that can be converted from 1.1 to 1.2 via software - will you don't necessarily have to replace your one- or two-year-old machine. Of course, even after this, the manufacturers will push the newly developed amplifiers with full steam, and the predecessors will slowly but surely disappear from the stage. (Finally, as a small note, we would like to note that the automatic "lip sync" that debuted with version 1.3 of HDMI — the correction of the audio and video tracks without slipping relative to each other — can be very useful in some cases.)
