Curse the fact (again) I don’t live in Japan! Akihabara News has greased their mitts all over Hanwa’s dongle, which upgrades the audio on your laptop to that of DTS surround sound sensation. More »
It’ll use up one of your valuable USB ports, and is only compatible with Windows, but a Hanwa USB valve tube that gives you the mighty power of DTS audio? Where do I sign up? More »
This upcoming bookshelf or nightstand CD player from Kenwood looks simple enough, but inside the company is promising surround sound quality output from just two speakers.
You actually know what some of the crazy doodles on the side of an HDTV means when it comes to video–720p, 1080i, 1080p. Congrats, you’re ahead of most people, like my mother. But do you understand the alphabet soup of audio, the confounding constellation of logos on your Blu-ray player’s box? While there are basically two rival home-theatre audio encoders–Dolby and DTS–they each have several different quality levels and options for different scenarios. Yeah, it’s a lot to keep up with, and it annoys us too. So we asked Dolby and DTS to put down their guns for a sec and help us sort it out.
Today, SCEA announced that the latest PS3 update, 2.30, would bring the ability to decode DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio tracks, that is to say, Blu-ray audio at variable bit rates up to 24.5Mbps, and 7.1 streaming of 96K/24-bit tracks. Does this make PS3 the best Blu-ray player ever? If you’ve got a receiver that can take an uncompressed audio stream of that magnitude via HDMI, then we think it does. UPDATE: To be clear, this decodes the DTS formats—plus Dolby’s formats, including Dolby TrueHD—and outputs all channels via HDMI to a receiver that can take a 5.1 or 7.1 PCM stream. It won’t do 5.1 or 7.1 analogue output. Also, as some of you have noted, it does NOT bitstream the DTS or Dolby data to a decoder inside a newer decoder-equipped receiver.
So many people forget that there’s much more to Hi-Def than just picture quality. The ability to listen to the movie’s soundtrack in lossless 7.1 surround sound is just as important, unless you happen to be slightly deaf, I guess.
So now that Blu-ray has trounced HD DVD, expect to see more surround sound packages like this one from Pioneer. As part of the LX range of products, which includes the best plasma TV ever, the HTP-LX70 is designed to compliment Pioneer’s top tier products.
It will decode Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD codecs hassle-free, and thanks to its three HDMI inputs, will scale video to 1080p on its way to your TV. Each of the speakers pumps out 50W, and the unit is also compatible with Pioneer’s iPod dock.
The setup will set you back $2,999, which isn’t bad considering it gives you pretty much everything you need to enjoy lossless surround sound. Now all you need is a full-profile Blu-ray player to go with it.
[Pioneer]
