The Panasonic DMP-BD10/DB10A does NOT do DTS-HD Master audio, the Sigma chipset used in that and many other early BD players does not have the horsepower according to Sigma themselves to handle MA. It does do DTS-HD High Resolution, however there aren't many discs with HR on them.
As I said above, I feel the current rush to bitstream is misplaced, even if some amp suppliers are currently benefiting from it.
Take TrueHD as an example, quite a few players decode TrueHD, yet people are reporting that decoding in the amp sounds better. How can that be? If the player decodes TrueHD and sends it over HDMI to an amp as PCM, the amps DACS should get pretty much the same PCM as the TrueHD decoder built into the amp. After all lossless is lossless, you can't get two different outputs from two different decoders.
So assuming people aren't hearing things, if amp decoded TrueHD sounds better, the fault with player decoded PCM must lie with how it gets from the player to the amp. In other words, they're simply confirming what Arcam told us, i.e. PCM over HDMI is prone to bad jitter which results in worse quality sound, hence thus far they haven't jumped on the bandwagon.
I guess it depends whether you want a player that has all it's facilities running in HD, or whether you're happy to use bitstream and forego the features that everyone says they want in a player, esp. Blu-ray as atm, most players don't have them..
Or whether you can be patient for either Arcam to come up with their own player/amp combination, or better players to arrive that have a) the features and b) the decoding to analogue capability.
Three of the latter are on their way this year so far, the Panasonic DMP-BD50, the Denon DVD-3800BD or the Marantz BD8002. All will decode all HD audio, are at least profile 1.1 compliant and all are supposed to have 7.1 analogue audio outs.