Dolby True HD & DTS HD - Works on older receivers?

[Trenton_net]

Hi Everyone,

So I know someone who has a media player which can do Dolby True HD and DTS HD passthrough to a receiver. If your receiver is old and only supports the original DD and DTS formats, what will happen?

I was told that both formats were backwards compatible, in a way that if your receiver is too old to understand the new data streams, it simply ignores it and falls back to the standard data streams embedded in True HD and DTS HD.

Is this true? Or is your blu-ray player responsible for extracting the original DD and DTS streams out of the HD streams and pass it to your receiver?

[la-li-lu-le-lo]

On most new Blu-ray players and similar devices (the PS3 for example) there is an option which lets you change which audio format is send via either HDMI or toslink.

If you choose True HD or DTS HD and connect it to an older receiver it probably won't work. If you choose Dolby Digital or something like that it will convert a disc or whatever type of video format you have into that format. Same goes for PCM. I have my PS3 set to output PCM (because my receiver is only set up to do stereo sound) and it just converts everything to PCM.

[Trenton_net]

Hrm... Actually I think on newer discs AC3 is interleaved with TrueHD so if you pipe that into your receiver, you just get the AC3 part.

[Yakumo]

Hmm, how old is your system? Mine is a 2003 5.1 Sony system that does DTS, Pro Logic, THX and so on. It's never had any problem with True HD.

[wombat]

DTS HD is downwards compatible, so if your receiver only accepts DTS it still gives sound :-). Within the DTS HD core there is also a DTS stream.

I think the same counts for Dolby True HD, but I'm not 100% sure on that one.

[Trenton_net]

Nah, True HD requires 2 discrete streams. Previously they separated them into two physical files. Now days, they interleave them into one file. I assume for the purpose of working like DTS HD does in that your receiver always plays "something".