[livin_smart]

I am fairly new to home cinema and I have to admit it getting a little bogged down and need a little advice please



I have an Arcam AVR280 which I bought when it was outgoing for £400. It is a fantastic amp for music, for which I mostly use it, however I bought it along with a 5.1 Tannoy Mercury/Mission speaker setup, with the full intention of creating a home cinema on a budget.

The 2 remaining purchases to complete the setup are a BD player and a projector. It is the BD player that is causing me the most anguish. I have not seen/heard any models in the flesh yet. My budget is £200-250 and no more than £300 for the BD player. I have read other articles and threads suggesting that Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA are not necessarily better than Dolby Digital Plus and the DTS equivalent, as the lossyness of the latter is carefully engineered to match the areas that the human ear cannot hear anyway. I am not bothered if I do not have the latest latest gear and I will happily pick up bargains as the bandwagon rolls onto the next thing. I do accept that this can present risks though and sometimes make life more tricky! Enter current issue - finding a BD player that will get the best out of my receiver. Suppose I buy a BD player that doesn't do the full HD audio, I think my ears would be satisfied with Dolby Digital Plus, BUT equally I don't want to buy a BD player that will quickly become obsolete. Like I said, I am not bothered if I do not have the latest latest gear, but I do want gear that will not become useless because formats end up moving on to an extent that movies are no longer released that will play on older gear. I don't mind buying well looked after 2nd hand gear if that suits my amp better than what is currently out there.

I have worked out that I can patch multichannel DVD-A audio inputs to the DVD component video inputs in advanced menu on the AVR280, which gives me a suitable multi-channel analogue audio input option. However, the AVR280's manual states this: "The AVR280 switches these analogue inputs directly to the analogue outputs via it's own volume control circuit. This direct path maintains the best possible sound quality...; it has the side-effect that there is no-bass management... In this case the bass-management functionality of the player itself should be used." So, I think I would need a BD player with bass management options (and possibly speaker setup options??)

Also, can someone explain what LPCM and PCM are vs bitstream please???

For the video inputs, does anyone know what spec the HDMI inputs on the AVR280 are? I assume they're not HDMI 1.3... What will be the best video connection through to the amp and then back out from the amp to the projector? The quality options are the HDMI ports or the RCA component video ports. Perhaps I'd be best going direct from the BD player straight to the proj if the AVR280 is going to lose information on the way through? If so and both were HDMI 1.3, then I think this would be better in terms of quality, but I'd like to use the AVR280 for all switching wherever possible.

Then there's the Profile 2.0 (BD-Live) compliance and ethernet connectivity, esp being download firmware updates. This seems like a very worthwhile feature, but what would the implications be of getting a deck without it? Richer Sounds are doing the Sony BDP-S300 for just £99 which may fit the bill. It's cheap, it has 5.1 analogue audio outputs and it can decode Dolby Digital Plus but would it be money well spent as it doesn't have ethernet, so will be difficult to update.... does this really matter?

I realise this has turned into quite an essay, so apologise! Any help and advice very gratefully received. Cheers