I'm a new BD-UP5000 owner and am very pleased with the video performance of this unit. It has played a variety of Blu Ray, HD DVD, and SD DVD's with fantastic PQ on our Sony KDS60A2000.

After reading many posts, I was disappointed to learn that the player doesn't bitstream the newer HD audio formats. I have an Onkyo R-640 receiver that has PCM multichannel capability and receives the video and audio from the Samsung via HDMI. Everything seems to be working properly, the PCM mutichannel light is displayed on the receiver, and sound is very good.

Is this PCM multichannel a step up from the regular DTS that was being received in bitstream mode, and is this equivalent to DTS-HD or other lossless formats? If I were to upgrade to an Onkyo 605, for instance, that decodes the newer audio formats, and had a player that bitstreamed those formats, would there be anything gained over my present configuration, or would I merely have a display lit on the new receiver that displayed DTS-HD?

I'm trying to determine if this audio bitstreaming problem with the BD-UP5000 is even an issue with a 5.1 Onkyo R640 system that supports PCM multichannel?

I'm a new BD-UP5000 owner and am very pleased with the video performance of this unit. It has played a variety of Blu Ray, HD DVD, and SD DVD's with fantastic PQ on our Sony KDS60A2000.

After reading many posts, I was disappointed to learn that the player doesn't bitstream the newer HD audio formats. I have an Onkyo R-640 receiver that has PCM multichannel capability and receives the video and audio from the Samsung via HDMI. Everything seems to be working properly, the PCM mutichannel light is displayed on the receiver, and sound is very good.

Is this PCM multichannel a step up from the regular DTS that was being received in bitstream mode, and is this equivalent to DTS-HD or other lossless formats? If I were to upgrade to an Onkyo 605, for instance, that decodes the newer audio formats, and had a player that bitstreamed those formats, would there be anything gained over my present configuration, or would I merely have a display lit on the new receiver that displayed DTS-HD?

I'm trying to determine if this audio bitstreaming problem with the BD-UP5000 is even an issue with a 5.1 Onkyo R640 system that supports PCM multichannel?

"PCM" is not a coding format. It could be called the "raw digital audio" -- what results from whichever decoder is selected in the player OR from the LPCM (uncompressed raw digital audio) track if the disc has one.

So, all the PCM light tells you is that you are getting decoded raw audio. It does not tell you what compression scheme (if any) was the source of that audio.

As I understand it, the codec set of the 5K is incomplete, and will be updated Real Soon Now. Since my AV receiver won't deal with anything past DTS ES (and is hooked up via analog 5.1 anyway), I really cannot tell you what it does with the coded data for formats it doesn't handle yet, and if they are available via bitstream or not, but there are reports that if it can't decode it, it can't read it off the disc. No telling what it does with TrueHD which it can partially decode. One would think it could pass the bitstream since it can read it.

when you use the multi-channel PCM connections, what you are saying in essence is: "hey player, please do all the decoding/mixing/etc and then send me the final mix in 6 full, uncompressed, PCM channels." This connection can use ANY of the audio codecs that the player supports because the player is doing ALL of the decoding and mixing.

now whether it is a step up from the bitstream mode is entirely dependent on the relative quality of the decoding in your receiver vs that in your player. to my ears, it would probably be VERY difficult to tell the difference.