Blu ray setting for music Concerts

[kicks2]

I am new to the home theater experience. My system is a 5.1 (all Martin Logans) with a blu ray player and receiver which supports all of the current decoding formats. My question is when playing a music concert on blu ray, which decoding format should I select on the blu ray to obtain the best sound quality? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

 

[RUR]

Assuming that by "decoding format" you mean audio codec, use whichever lossless codec is included on the particular Blu-ray disc being played. DTS HD MA, Dolby True HD and PCM are all lossless and any of these will provide excellent SQ.

 

[sleepysurf]

Most DVD's and Blu-ray Discs usually have an audio "setup" option in the "top menu", typically offering playback as 2 channel stereo or 5.1 multichannel. I'd certainly recommend the latter, if your receiver/processor can properly decode it.

 

[JonFo]

As the other noted, go for the highest quality multichannel codec on the disc.

And be watchful, as some discs, like the BlueMan group "how to be a Megastar" disc force you select the PCM surround track by hand, or it defaults to basic DolbyDigital (same encoding as the DVD).

Another thing to check: in your processor, ensure that THX and 'cinema' modes are turned off, as they roll off the highs.

For music discs, basic 'Standard' processing mode is what you want, regardless of codec.

And note that some processor remember std vs THX based on codec, not just input. So for PCM you might have THX off, but feed a TrueHD bitstream, and THX might be on. Therefore, check these settings once the disc is actually sending the selected audio stream and you are listening to music.

See, that’s easy


/Rant-On/
While BluRay as a format has great audio options, they still don't encode enough meta-data on the discs to have a seamless 'best-possible-experience' group of settings happen automatically.

The player should report all possible audio and video permutation info to the processor, and the processor would go: “Oh, this a music video, and it has a five channel PCM track as the highest fidelity, and since the player is linked up via HMDI, I can have the player send me that. Since it’s also a music disc, I’ll switch off the THX and other ‘cinema’ re-equalization settings. Hey, player, send me the ‘5.1 PCM soundtrack’”. The player then dutifully obeys and passes this.

It's not like there's a real technical barrier, what with CEC on HDMI enabling bidirectional communications between player and a processor, and plenty of space and a nice structured data model for BR discs, etc. etc. Aargh
/Rant-Off/

 

[kicks2]

JonFo thanks for your input. What is codec?

 

[JonFo]

A codec is defined as:

The term audio codec has two meanings, both referring to something that encodes and decodes. The term codec is a combination of 'coder-decoder'.

In software, a codec is a computer program that compresses/decompresses digital audio data according to a given audio file format or streaming audio format. The object of a codec algorithm is to represent the high-fidelity audio signal with minimum number of bits while retaining the quality. This can effectively reduce the storage space and the bandwidth required for transmission of the stored audio file. Most codecs are implemented as libraries which interface to one or more multimedia players, such as QuickTime Player, XMMS, Winamp or Windows Media Player.

In hardware, the term "audio codec" refers to a single device that encodes analog audio as digital signals and vice versa. This is used in sound cards that support both audio in and out, for instance.

BluRays offer the user choices of DTS, DTS-HD DolbyDigital or Dolby TrueHD codecs to hear the soundtracks.

Your choice of codec is sometimes restricted by the capabilities of both the player and the receiver or processor.