Panasonic BD-60 with Onkyo HTS-5200 (HDMI passthrough?)

[scubaryan]

Came across this informative forum while researching my 2 prospective buys for Christmas. I have already ordered an Onkyo S5200 system, that has HDMI passthough...which means I have to feed audio sources into the receiver with either optical/coaxial (not via HDMI cables).

There is a blu-ray player I found called the DMP-BD60 from Panasonic that has a built-in decoder for the Dolby True and all other important Blu-ray audio formats.

My question is: Will I still have high quality Blu-ray audio if I have the BD60 to decode the blu-ray audio and feed it into the Onkyo receiver via optical cables? Or is there a big enough difference to consider a blu-ray player (with built in blu-ray audio decoders) WITH COMPONENT 7.1 output ?

Any comments/tips would be much appreciated, boxing day approaches.

[MrBoylan]

Came across this informative forum while researching my 2 prospective buys for Christmas. I have already ordered an Onkyo S5200 system, that has HDMI passthough...which means I have to feed audio sources into the receiver with either optical/coaxial (not via HDMI cables).

There is a blu-ray player I found called the DMP-BD60 from Panasonic that has a built-in decoder for the Dolby True and all other important Blu-ray audio formats.

My question is: Will I still have high quality Blu-ray audio if I have the BD60 to decode the blu-ray audio and feed it into the Onkyo receiver via optical cables? Or is there a big enough difference to consider a blu-ray player (with built in blu-ray audio decoders) WITH COMPONENT 7.1 output ?

Any comments/tips would be much appreciated, boxing day approaches.

Hi, and welcome to the forum!

Unfortunately the Onkyo HT-S5200 system is not really an ideal match for Blu-ray Disc. Without either HDMI audio decoding or a multi-channel analog input (neither of which the 5200 system has), you can't take full advantage of the latest and greatest Blu-ray Audio formats, namely DTS-HD, Dolby TrueHD and multi-channel PCM. The BD60 player does have on-board decoding but this doesn't help you because internal decoding simply extracts these new lossless codecs to uncompressed multi-channel PCM which can *only* be transmitted over HDMI (not fiberoptic).

With your system's fiberoptic or coax S/PDIF inputs, any Blu-ray player you get will be limited to standard Dolby Digital and DTS output. This means that if you watch a Blu-ray Disc with DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 sound, the player will send out standard lossy DTS 5.1 sound instead. If you watch a movie with Dolby TrueHD 7.1, you will get standard lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 sound instead. and if you watch a Blu-ray movie with multi-channel uncompressed PCM sound, then you will get two-channel (stereo) PCM sound instead. Other than the 2-channel PCM limitation, standard DTS and Dolby Digital can sound pretty good - at least as good as DVD and, in the case of Dolby, slightly better due to the increased sampling rates possible on Blu-ray Disc. But it won't be the full quality of which Blu-ray is capable.

If you're dead set on keeping the 5200 system, then you might consider getting an LG or Samsung Blu-ray player instead of the Panasonic. These players offer a "DTS re-encode" mode which will internally decode the Blu-ray soundtracks to multi-channel PCM, then re-encode to DTS surround. This is still lossy compression, and it's limited to 5.1 surround (no 7.1), but it is about the best sound you can get over a standard S/PDIF digital connection. And it will allow you to get discrete multi-channel surround from Blu-rays that have multi-channel PCM soundtracks.

You might consider upgrading to the Onkyo HT-S6200 system, or the Panasonic SC-BT200 or SC-BT300 -- all of these systems support HDMI audio decoding so you can get the full quality of Blu-ray Disc. Of course, my suggestion would be to buy a separate receiver and speakers instead, as the speakers of these HTiB systems tend to be pretty weak, but then your system cost is going to go up a bit. An Onkyo HT-RC160 receiver would cost around $325 and speakers would run you anywhere from $250 to upwards of $1000 for nice 5.1 channel systems. But then you'd get better performance and more flexibility for future system upgrades.

Good luck and happy holidays!

-Chris