Toshiba's New HD-XA2 HD DVD Player

I was going to give you the specs for Toshiba's new HD-XA2, but why don't I just show them to you? Notice that while the player supports Dolby TrueHD, it only supports the core track of DTS HD Master Audio. That is, the player will not decode DTS HD Master Audio to full resolution multichannel PCM for transmission to your audio system via HDMI as digital PCM (or convert it to analog for extraction from the player's analog outs in full resolution). Instead it will play back such a track as standard DTS. Presumably it will transmit DTS HD Master Audio in its native form through the HDMI 1.3 link, but we still will need AV receivers or pre-pros that will accept and decode that form of signal from an HDMI 1.3 connection. As yet, none will do so, but we expect to see them within the next year.

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