| Editorial March 2004
Digital Processing: Where Do You Want Yours?
Wouldn’t it be nice if all the digital
processing one needs for a flexible home-entertainment system -- by which I mean a system
configured to reproduce music and film sound with equal quality -- were contained in a
single component? That box, which would fulfill all of your entertainment needs, would be
the source from which all manner of aural and visual pleasure would flow: movies,
high-resolution multichannel music, satellite radio, wireless transmission reception from
your computer -- and, of course, CD, for starters. We’re heading in that direction
with the universal audio/video player, but some important steps still need to be taken.
I’m just not sure they will be.
Right now, a typical home theater consists of, among other
things, a DVD player and a processor or receiver. The digital signal derived from CDs, or
Dolby Digital- and DTS-encoded DVD movies, is sent to the processor or receiver, where it
is decoded and modified with all types of fancy algorithms before being sent on to the
power amps (in the case of the processor) or the speakers (in the case of the receiver)
via analog cables. However, if you have a player capable of DVD-Audio and/or SACD, but you
don’t have a system from one of the few manufacturers capable of digital transmission
of said formats, you have to have analog connectivity, too, via six-channel
inputs/outputs. But who ever decided that we needed to keep some digital processing
in the player, while sending the rest to another component? And why is some of the
processing that we need nonexistent in either box?
This creates issues for the consumer. Do you have analog
bass management in your standalone processor, for the proper routing of SACD and DVD-A
signals throughout your system? If you don’t, the multichannel capabilities of those
formats might prove useless. Does your standalone processor convert the SACD and DVD-A
signals from your player back to digital in order to implement bass management? If
it does, it might not sound any better than a 1982 CD player. Heck, does your processor
even have six-channel inputs for a universal player’s analog outputs?
All of these questions pose a larger, more encompassing
one: If you had all of the digital processing in the source player, including a few inputs
for external digital sources such as satellite, would any of this matter? Nope.
I’m tired of having a DVD player with inadequate bass
management, and I don’t want to be forced into buying an expensive processor that may
or may not be compatible with whatever new formats might be coming down the pike. The
upshot is that most people will have two obsolete digital boat anchors -- a player and a
processor -- when one would do very nicely. I’d prefer to have a multichannel preamp,
or a multichannel integrated amplifier such as the Threshold Dragon V, and a source player
that has all the digital processing necessary to guide the functionality of my
system.
And if it’s truly a universal player,
why not throw in satellite radio? Would that not add to the value of Sirius and XM? Those
companies should be able to transmit Dolby Digital and DTS programming right into your DVD
player or processor. I’d likely subscribe to one of those services if that function
came with my DVD player. But, of course, everyone is touting yet another box to add to the
system.
A word to electronics manufacturers: Get with it and make a
one-box source component that keeps all the digital processing in one place. When owners
needs upgrades, they can send in that future-proof device or download a software update.
No more incompatibility, no more functional snafus, no more confusion in the marketplace
when it comes to what software will work in a system and what won’t. I think
we’d all be happier with that.
...Jeff Fritz
editor@hometheatersound.com |
