Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought much of the TrueHD material out there was on HD DVD, and BD features more the DTS-MA track?? Both are "lossless" and properly rendered/decoded should give the same results.
I can't comment on the BD world...yet...but I have gained a good bit of experience with TrueHD in the HD DVD world. My only connections between players (Toshiba HD-A2 and HD-A35) and receiver (Sony 5300) are HDMI1.3, so those cables are doing all the A/V work. My first player, the A2, would not output the TrueHD bitstream. It had its own on-board decoder for TrueHD and the product was a PCM stream over HDMI (either 1.0 or 1.3) that the receiver then decoded, and showed "Linear PCM" as the source in its display. In theory the quality should be the same, assuming the TrueHD decoder in the player is equal to that in the receiver, but we're a generation apart so I really wanted to hear how the system sounded when TrueHD is decoded in the receiver. I also think - no proof - that something less-than-optimal is going to happen when you take a lossless audio track and compress it to PCM to send it over the cable, then unpack it again in the receiver! To get the TrueHD decoder in the A2 working there were some set-up contortions I had to perform, all detailed in the manual. But I had no way of knowing which audio I was really hearing and really couldn't tell any difference between settings in the player!
I later bought the A35 player that outputs the TrueHD bitstream over HDMI, expressly for that reason! The receiver decodes it, and the TrueHD indicator in the receiver is lit and the display reports that mode on start-up. Again to enable TrueHD in the player I had to do some on-screen set-up selections per the manual. I then learned that for most HD DVD disks the default audio is DD+, and that to output the TrueHD track I had to do another set-up in the movie itself, in the audio menu. All but one I have played so far have DD+ as the default audio track and I have to select the TrueHD track each time I load the disk if I want to hear that one. So without performing both set-ups (the one in the player should be a 1-time deal, but I have had to reset it more than once when TrueHD would not be reported by the receiver!) I was not sending/hearing TrueHD, something that you might need to play around with as well in your PS3 and with your BD disks that have lossless tracks.
The difference between DD+ and TrueHD is not earth shattering, but to me the TrueHD tracks seem more "open" and with more virtual sources within the soundfield. You'll have to experience it to know what I'm describing. So if that's for real, it means that even tho' the A2 can decode TrueHD, I'm not hearing the same higher, fuller quality as I can hear with the A35 sending the lossless bitstream to the receiver for decoding!
Again - I have no idea what your experience with BD and DTS-MA/TrueHD will be, but I'm betting that some set-ups are required. You might also be able to use the analog multichannel audio outputs on a player (5.1 or 7.1) if you have them directly to similar inputs on the receiver. Of course then the player is doing all the decoding including the D/A conversion, and that might not be your best choice depending on your equipment capabilities, but I'm guessing that would at least avoid the compression to PCM prior to the D/A conversion.
Let us know what you experience...!
is it that big of a difference? and if I get just a reciever (looking at onkyo 605 for 230) will my speakers be good to go for awhile? or should I get a set of speakers saw a really nice speaker set at bestbuy for 200...opinons suggestions?
