Ditch Tag go HD?

TAG Maclaren? Audio? news to me!
 
TAG Maclaren? Audio? news to me!

Some of us remember it fondly and it was a far better time for audio.... Still largely not bettered either
 
Graham, the audio signal via hdmi is not copy protected if i remember rightly, the HDCP code needs to be in the display device. You are right in saying that this is a nightmare and it is. i have given up on trying to use HDMI and display devices as you keep getting HDCP error's all the time.

also a lot of the HD DVD players or Blu ray players will down mix a HD audio track to full bit rate DTS, 1.5mbs and you are right feed this into a tag processor and the sound is fantastic as very, very few SD DVD disks with a dts sound track have 1.5mbs sound on, mot are 768Kbps if i remember correctly. I think the eagles farewell tour is one of the very few SD DVD's with a 1.5mbs DTS soundtrack on it.
 
What bitrates are the new lossless sound formats? I'm pretty sure when I was listening to some True HD on a mate's Onkyo 875 that this was 1.5Mbps...

Downmixing to 1.5Mbps DTS has got to sound pretty good. That's another interesting option for my 'upgrade' path to HD without relying upon the DACs in the player.
 
Graham, the audio signal via hdmi is not copy protected if i remember rightly, the HDCP code needs to be in the display device. You are right in saying that this is a nightmare and it is. i have given up on trying to use HDMI and display devices as you keep getting HDCP error's all the time.

also a lot of the HD DVD players or Blu ray players will down mix a HD audio track to full bit rate DTS, 1.5mbs and you are right feed this into a tag processor and the sound is fantastic as very, very few SD DVD disks with a dts sound track have 1.5mbs sound on, mot are 768Kbps if i remember correctly. I think the eagles farewell tour is one of the very few SD DVD's with a 1.5mbs DTS soundtrack on it.
The new audio formats are well and truely copy protected, I seriously doubt you could ever break them out to feed something else like you can with anything that goes down SPDIF.......
As for downmixing etc. it can go well or badly, but at the end of the day a good sound engineer on the mixing desk will make far more differnce to the end result than any new sound format.....
 
Miles, If it was 1.5mbs then it could have been what is called Dolby Digital Plus, this is a 1.5mbs ausio track. On my HDVD's a Dolby True HD track is about 2.2mbs and on the blue rays I have the uncompressed PCM track is 6mbps.

Cheers,
 
I've been doing a bit more reading up on this today...

AIUI Many of the current crop of HD-DVD players (including the soon to be available Toshiba EP30 and EP35) have the ability to downmix these new HD audio formats into full rate 96/24 DTS. Now this opens up an interesting possibility for connecting a HD-DVD player by S/PDIF and letting the Tag do it's stuff with a 1509 Kbps 96/24 DTS input, which even if it only supports the 'core' decoding will provide 5.1 channels with 24KHz top end (which is above what I can hear anyway) from the 48/24 core decode.

Now I can't help but think that 96/24 or even 48/24 from the Tag is going to be all but indistinguishable (if not better) than a lossless decode within a player like the EP35 connected via analogue pass-through...

Has anyone tried this yet?
 
I've been doing a bit more reading up on this today...

AIUI Many of the current crop of HD-DVD players (including the soon to be available Toshiba EP30 and EP35) have the ability to downmix these new HD audio formats into 96/24 DTS. Now this opens up an interesting possibility for connecting a HD-DVD player by S/PDIF and letting the Tag do it's stuff with a 1509 Kbps 96/24 DTS input, which even if it only supports the 'core' decoding will provide 5.1 channels with 24KHz top end (which is above what I can hear anyway) from the 48/24 core decode.

Now I can't help but think that 96/24 or even 48/24 from the Tag is going to be all but indistinguishable (if not better) than a lossless decode within a player like the EP35 connected via analogue pass-through...

Has anyone tried this yet?

I would like to know this also. I am not ready to dump my TAG kit yet. Like some others on here I have just bought a Pio LX508 screen and I am looking to buy a 1080p player. Either Bluray, HD DVD or both. Obviously I would have to connect via analogue.

Now, If I get the equivalent of DVD dts sound via S/PDIF will be happy. Also, there will still be room correction which I will not via bypass. Secondly I will only need one cable which will be cheaper :) Finally, If I add a second 1080p player I wont have the issue of having to connect 2 players to on set of bypass inputs.

So, I would like to know if anyone has done this also! Then I might just be tempted to by a player :clap:
 
Now, If I get the equivalent of DVD dts sound via S/PDIF will be happy.

You should actually get better sound quality than DTS DVDs because almost all are encoded at the 'half rate' of 754Kbps rather than the 1509Kbps 'full rate'. As you say DTS already sounds very good and 754 Kbps compares favourably with the 448Kbps commonly found on DD5.1 DVDs, although it seems that the different codecs mean that sound quality is not directly proportional to bitrate.

Reading the handbook of my Audiolab 8000AV (ex AV30R) it states that it does not natively support 96/24 DTS, but that it does support the core 48/24 decode of 5.1 channels. From what I've read today the extension decode that I would be missing carries the 24-48KHz audio of all channels and up to two additional channels...which I am not personally going to miss.

There must surely be someone out there with an HD player who has tried this. I don't think the full rate DTS downmix option is a new thing at all.
 
There must surely be someone out there with an HD player who has tried this. I don't think the full rate DTS downmix option is a new thing at all.


Interestingly, the AV32DP manual mentions DTS 96/24 in the contents, referring to page 37. However, Page 37 is missing from the download version from this site.

EDIT: In my hard copy manual, page 37 is there, and DTS96/24 is decoded by the DP.

I'd be willing to bet that DTS96/24 with TMREQ sounds better than "HD sound" with no TMREQ.
 
I remember that DTS24/96 needed dual processors and even some TLC with Steve's firmware to get perfect results. T I think all DP's and 192Rs can do DTS24/96, I am curious if the downsampled blu-ray output works with TAG gear, does the Pioneer BLX70 player do this? If so I'll try our one at work...
 
Let us know how the analogue outs and DD downmix on S/PDIF compare with regular DD 5.1
 
Um whats the point without Dolby True HD and DTS HD processing? Am I missing something?
 
AIUI it will D to A up to eight 24/96 audio channels carried in the HDMI signal. So you're dependent upon the source doing the decode and supplying the HD output (as LPCM) in the HDMI rather than sending it as bitstream for the 8000AP to decode.

So it doesn't actually decode Dolby HD etc (from a bitstream) but it can reproduce HD audio from a suitable source.
 
Hmm, maybe the HDMI board could be retrofitted somehow to the AV32DP? Now that would be something! :clap:

Cheers

(still dreaming and hoping...)
 
Hmm, maybe the HDMI board could be retrofitted somehow to the AV32DP? Now that would be something! :clap:

Cheers

(still dreaming and hoping...)

THAT would be very nice. sacd, dvd-a, blurry-disk/hd-dvd with highresolution sound AND TMREQ... :thumbsup:

any realistic chances that maybe audiocellar could fit in a hdmi 1.3a input and one of the firmware-gods from the late tag employees could write an according firmware?

i would gladly shell some cash for something like that... :rolleyes:
 

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