TAG Maclaren? Audio? news to me!
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.......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.
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?
Now, If I get the equivalent of DVD dts sound via S/PDIF will be happy.
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.
Hmm, maybe the HDMI board could be retrofitted somehow to the AV32DP? Now that would be something!
Cheers
(still dreaming and hoping...)
i would gladly shell some cash for something like that...