[Gonkius]

Hi all. I have an AVP-16 with 2 REF9 and 3 REF8.5 for my electrostatic panels, excellent combination. I have used the Denon DVD 2910 as a DVD and SACD player for a while. SB3 for music. I now have a Playstation 3 for BD and DVD playback. My wish is to replace the Denon completely by the PS3 for BD, DVD and even SACD. Unfortunately the PS3 has got only stereo analog outputs. The digital output will only leave the usual compressed DTS/DD audio formats.

However in the HDMI cable the PS3 can leave uncompressed multi-channel PCM for both SACD and BD audio. In the PS3 setup it is possible to define what formats the decoder can handle: bitrate, number of channels or bitstream/PCM coding. This is normally decoded in a HDMI receiver. However with a HDMI-switch, such as the Purelink hs-42a http://www.purelinkav.com/hs_42a.htm, it is possible to split the HDMI-audio into a separate coaxial digital connector which could be hooked up into the AVP-16.

According to the AVP-16 manual, it cannot decode such mulitchannel uncompressed PCM streams. But datasheets for the AVP-16 is known to have many errors. (Mechanical dimensions is wrong and the number of digital inputs as well - The real unit is smaller/better than the data sheet!)

So my question is simply if the AVP-16 can decode such streams? Or if anybody know exactly what streams the unit can handle?

[sac8d4]

Im afraid the Avp-16 (nor any pre/pro without HDMI switching) has the ability (permission) to decode HDMI audio into PCM via some HDMI  S/Pdif switch ( now if someone made a HDMI to multichannel analog out, that very well could work and would be an easy souluion for those who are using the PS3 at a universal player) and the fact due to a large part would have to do with copyright protection and not the manufacturers not being able to design such a device. The copyright protection feature of the DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD (SACD) disc format prohibits unprotected digital audio output. Since the coaxial or optical digital audio output has no copy-protection ability (i.e. pure audio stream without encryption and authentication), audio from DVD-Audio or SACD cannot be output via these interfaces. .... Also worth noting is that *Multi-channel*SACD can only be passed over HDMI 1.2 enabled devices unless they find some way around that such as Oppo's conversion of DSD to PCM before sending the signal to the analog outputs.

[nuforce-casey]

Hi,
I do not see any evident that PureLink supports multi-channel HDMI audio decoding, physically, with single coaxial and single optical output, there is no way to send 8 decoded (from HDMI multi-channel audio) channel with a digital audio link.

To clarify things, HDMI 1.1 supports multichannel, and 1.2 in additional supports SACD multichannel.  Difference however, is that there is no mentioning that with multichannel SACD, the downstream component could decode high-bandwidth digital audio at 96khz/24bit because the supported data rate doesn't add up.   Therefore, the true multichannel (true) HD audio up to 8 x 96kHz/24bit, is only supported with HDMI 1.3.

DSD to PCM transcoding, in my opinion, is perfectly fine, because at the end of the day, there is rarely any pure DSD recordings.  Most of the SACD we have today are recorded, processed, and produced in PCM, then transcoded to DSD purely to cater to 'audiophiles'.