My Review of Toshiba’s HD-DVD player the HD-A1.

[leaderc]

I just wanted to add a second opinion to Joe's. I recently got an HD-A1 along with TLS and Apollo 13. My system is described below. What Joe said is really true about some parts of the movie looking great (especially the detail in backgrounds), but other parts look no better than 480P off my Krell DVD player. I have only tried the audio via TOS, not through the 5 interconnects. The audio is good, maybe I'd go as far as great, my pre/pro is also treating the Dolby TrueHD as DTS for the moment, I hope that gets fixed in the discs soon.

I'm really hoping that some of the releases coming yet: Batman Begins, and Harry Potter Goblet will really show off the HD-DVD format better than these two examples have so far. Overall, I'm looking forward to Blu-ray more. Not disappointed, but not overly impressed either.

My system:
Philips 50" Plasma
Ascent i's up front
Cinema i
Clarity surrounds
2 Paradigm Seismic 12 subwoofers
Krell Showcase pre/pro
Toshiba HD-A1 (obviously)
Sunfire Cinema grand (for center and surrounds)
Krell 350M monoblocks up front
Transparent Music Link Plus cabling all the way around

 

[Munster]

I read it here on the recall:

http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=49884

 

[Reverb2009]

I read it here on the recall:

http://www.soundandvisionmag.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=49884

Yup,

Best Buy/Magnolia told me the same thing there is a recall, but when asking them what is being fixed they said a firmware upgrade and maybe some hardware mods. I asked him why I would have to send my player in for a firmware update when the player comes with a broadband port in the back for firmware updates? The little dumb a$$ had no reply.

I asked a Toshiba rep last week about a recall and was told, “At this time there is no recall on the HD-A1”.

 

[JonFo]

…I have only tried the audio via TOS, not through the 5 interconnects. The audio is good, maybe I'd go as far as great, my pre/pro is also treating the Dolby TrueHD as DTS for the moment, I hope that gets fixed in the discs soon.

…

You might want to read up on the HD-A1 FAQ on AVSForum, it will clear up the audio confusion for you.

If using SPDIF (Toslink) to feed the pre-pro, then all you will get from the player is the re-encoded DTS signals.
The player does TrueHD decoding to PCM feeds that out the HDMI 1.2 link if our Pre-pro supports that, or it goes through it’s own D/A stages and out the analog jacks.
Otherwise, it re-encodes the six channels into DTS and puts that out the SPDIF for backward compatibility with older equipment.

It probably wont be until players and pre-pros adopt HDMI 1.3 that we will see TrueHD datastreams being passed straight through to the preamps.

Right now, to really hear what the new audio codecs can deliver, you must use the analog outs.

And just to be clear, it’s not the discs; it’s just how the player works, which is a reasonable design given that there are no HDMI 1.3 pre-pros out yet.

 

[Reverb2009]

Right now, to really hear what the new audio codecs can deliver, you must use the analog outs.

Or have a Pre-pro, that has HDMI 1.1 on board, have the player do the processing and send a PCM single over HDMI to the pre-pro for playback. Only problem is the HD-A1 does not have a DTS-HD decoder for that and the Dolby decoder can only do 2 channels of Dolby true audio. Eventually receivers and pre-amps will have HDMI switching with HDMI 1.3 spec. So we can send an unprocessed single over HDMI to the pre-amp for decoding, un tell then the player can decode it and pre-pro can play it back.