Hi Neil,
Don't the Toshiba HD DVD players output everything as DTS, regardless of input? I'm sure I remember this being the case at launch, and do not know if it has been fixed.
That depends... I have the Toshiba HD-XE1 (which is the top of the line European model), and there are several output options: SPDIF, HDMI, 5.1 channel ananlogue, and 2 channel analogue.
Depending on the settings of the unit, you will get different signals at the various outputs. You can look up the conversion table for this in the
Owners Manual, take a look at page 63.
It seems that via SPDIF you get a dts signal only for dts sources and PCM sources from HD DVDs (because they could be multichannel). Ot says that for Dolby sources you get a Dolby output.
I'm using the HDMI output with a conversion to Multichannel PCM which my Denon 4306 can handle. The drawback is that this only works for 5.1 channels and not 7.1, but since I only have a 5.1 speaker setup anyway that's ok for me. The PCM signal always registers as 96/24 on my 4306, so I guess the Toshiba does an upsampling of any source.
The other (and for me more severe) drawback is that the built-in dts decoder only handles the dts Core, so I can not take advantage of any dts-HD content on the discs.
The player has a built-in DD+ and TrueHD decoder, though, so I get at least that!
The third drawback is (now that the first AV Receivers with dts-HD and DD+/TrueHD decoders are appearing on the market) that I cannot set the player to output the bitstream for the new formats. But I still have hope that this will be added in a future firmware upgrade. My player has an HDMI 1.3 output and from what I read the chipset used would support this in principle...
Best regards,
Oliver