2015-11-14, 13:52
Phew!
You're broadly right. The only situation where you would be better off decoding HD Audio on your Pi 2 rather than bitstreaming DD/DTS secondaries/cores would be for a stereo soundtrack. There are some TV releases (at least in Europe) with a stereo HD Audio soundtrack. PCM 2.0 (losslessly if 48k/16bit) decoded from HD Audio stereo could well be better quality than a DD/DTS lossy compressed version.
However for 5.1/7.1 HD Audio you are better off bitstreaming the 5.1 DD/DTS stream, as you can't carry 5.1/7.1 PCM over a standard SPDIF Toslink/Coax connection and if you decoded you'd be limited to 2.0 stereo down
mixing.
You're broadly right. The only situation where you would be better off decoding HD Audio on your Pi 2 rather than bitstreaming DD/DTS secondaries/cores would be for a stereo soundtrack. There are some TV releases (at least in Europe) with a stereo HD Audio soundtrack. PCM 2.0 (losslessly if 48k/16bit) decoded from HD Audio stereo could well be better quality than a DD/DTS lossy compressed version.
However for 5.1/7.1 HD Audio you are better off bitstreaming the 5.1 DD/DTS stream, as you can't carry 5.1/7.1 PCM over a standard SPDIF Toslink/Coax connection and if you decoded you'd be limited to 2.0 stereo down
mixing.
