Aye, so I'll go for an HDMI compatible player, else it will work just as fine if it's got 5.1 analog out? Basically, the only difference is where the conversion takes place?
I don't follow when it comes to transport (bit vs LPCM), basically, is that two different ways the signal travels? Is any of them lossy? Forgive me for being a bit slow but this is the best answers I've got so far on this
Sorry for the late reply. Some parts are already covered by the guys
as Gene (GOS) said, is one able to tell the difference between one way of decoding above the other?
In theory it is better to do the decoding with the machine that has the best DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter). When you let the player decode from digital to analog you use the analog outs from the player and connect those to the analog in on the receiver.
When the receiver has a better DAC, you can either send , using HDMI connection from the player to the receiver, a bistream (which is the unaltered Dolby, DTS etc) and let the receiver decode the whole thing to analog. Or you can let the player decode from DTS/Dolby/MLP to LPCM and send throught HDMI and let the receiver decode from LPCM to analog.
The advantage of letting the receiver decode from digital to analog is that you can use bass management in your receiver, which can have more features than a player.
My set-up is analog out of the player to my pre amp, which sounds fine. I choose this route as I already had the pre amp and amp. If I would start again I might go the HDMI route.
So hopefully I am not making it more confusing for you