New Sony Blu-ray Player--BDP-S770 - Page 6

Sony Style stores may still be an option for some depending upon where you live. I'm still debating though between this player and the S570 which they are selling for $139 currently.

Amazon has the 770 on stock. Unfortunately, the price has really gone up!

no...amazon "had" stock; electronics expo for $249. i purchased what appears to be the last unit @ $199.01 using promo code GOBLU but may find out otherwise when they update inventory on monday....

Well I went out and bought one yesterday and answered my own question.

On the DTS-ES HDMA track it outputs 7.1 MPCM by applying DTS NEO:6 internally! On the DD-EX track it just output 5.1 MPCM. So it seems impossible to get 6.1 MPCM.

Folks interested cannot get it for $199.99 at Sony Style stores in their area? The location closes to me in Menlo Park NJ has them in stock and that was the price yesterday. Perhaps you can call them and have it shipped????

Edit: Well I checked their website and now the S770 is $249 and the S570 is $179.99. Aaaarrrrggghhh.

2nd edit: The price of the player remains $199.99 for the S770 and $139.99 for the S570 at my local store. I checked a little while ago so either the website was neglected or in store pricing is different.

Stefan, I'm just wanting to make sure I understand your goal. Are you just trying to make sure you get the surround back channel on T2 when you set the HDMI audio setting to PCM? There are so few BDs with a DTS-HD MA 6.1 track--and there has been much discussion elsewhere about how BD players handle surround back decoding on T2 and the Pixar BDs--so I'm just wondering if this query is of primarily academic/engineering interest.

I peeped your profile and you have a Lex RV-8? Isn't that piece pre-HDMI anyway?

(And technically speaking, there is no such thing as "DTS-ES HDMA." DTS' higher/high rez codecs on BD are DTS-HD High Resolution and DTS-HD Master Audio. I'm sure you likely know this but the wrong nomenclature is part of what initially confused me about what you're asking and why.)

Finally, I also note that with the latest firmware (M04.R.708), my 470 now has a DTS Neo:6 setting under Audio Settings that it did not have previously. "Cinema," "Music" and "Off." This is not even listed in the 470 manual under Audio Settings (page 23). But I do note from looking at the 770 manual online that this setting IS listed in the 770's manual (page 24). (And the 470 and 770 are currently on the same latest firmware.)

I suspect that maybe this setting is turned to one of its on modes and you're thereby extrapolating what the general 6.1-PCM-via-HDMI m.o. of the player is when it's possible that's not always the case?

Hi Paul,
Yes I am performing a "shakedown" of my new system (profile now updated). I would like to hear the same 6.1 channels that the SD DVD offers but in high resolution. One reason I am so interested in surround back channels is I shelled out the extra few grand to get the latest Anthem processor that can handle 6.1 and 7.1 from the source, to better justify upgrading from the already competent Lexicon system.

After discovering that this T2 disc didn't work as expected when bitstreaming (5.1 only) and there was no way to force MPCM on the BDP-s550, I took it to the Anthem processor thread where I was kindly informed about the improper "6.1" labelling of the 5.1 ES track. Anyway that turned out to be a "red herring" for some readers, and then we concluded something must be wrong with the Anthem for not detecting the ES flag in the bitstream. Note, I am assuming that the terms "HD" and "Master Audio" are irrelevant for the moment.

Since I was not able to test MPCM with the BDP-s550 and my "bitstreaming happy" new Anthem, I decided to try upgrading the 770 before taking this issue to Sonic Frontiers (Anthem support). So here we are.

Thank you for mentioning this! I am still running the stock firmware because I am having trouble getting a strong-enough wireless internet signal into the home theatre. The 770 does have the option and I've set it to OFF, but Neo:6 still kicks in on this title. There may be a bug because I'm not on the latest firmware.

I am getting 7.1 PCM from the player on this disc now, but no way to tell if it's Neo:6 magic (out of control) or a combination of the Matrixed ES track and Neo:6. Hopefully the latter. Ideally I would like to see some form of 6.1 coming off it without extra processing before moving on.

Anybody know of any other titles to try? I guess I could try DD TrueHD 5.1 EX too if there is such a thing. I've already verified regular DD 5.1 EX works as expected.

Firmware updated, now Neo:6 can be truly switched OFF. However I think they introduced a new problem in that Neo doesn't work with the DTS-HDMA 5.1 track at all now, no matter what the setting. So with Neo:6 set to "Cinema" I get 7.1 in the menus and 5.1 during the film! I'm just going to leave it off.

Also the player no longer indicates "DTS-HD Master Audio ES 6.1 Matrix 3/3.1 48 kHz" like the s550 did when playing T2: Skynet. All I get is "DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 48 kHz" and the ES flag is not passed to the receiver (like before) unless there is a bug in the Anthem which ignores the flag.

Note: I popped in Total Recall and got "DTS-HD High Resolution ES 6.1" which works as expected. It does both bitstream 6.1 and 7.1 PCM correctly, so I kinda doubt there is a bug in the Anthem. More like T2: Skynet is just plain confusing and the new Sony firmware has tried to eliminate confusion by ignoring the ES flag :|

DTS Neo 6 has nothing to do with 5.1 or greater soundtracks. You wouldn't want it to "work" when playing back DTS-HDMA, etc.

http://www.hometheaterfocus.com/surround/dts-neo-6.aspx

Thanks a ton for that HTF link to Van Ling's thread, Stefan. Great to hear it from the source re what happened with T2's (mis)labeling.


Chs4000 beat me to it: without even yet having gone to his link, I was going to reiterate what the 770 manual says, which is that it applies Neo:6 processing to 2-channel tracks to create multichannel.


Thanks for quoting exactly what your receiver indicates is the audio codec and rez it is receiving with T2. I was confused insofar as I didn't think there was such a thing as ES encoding with the high rez codecs. I've looked at many DTS style guides and have a few of their demo discs and none refer to that. Largely due to SA-CD and DVD-A, I've been analog m.c. for years so I am used to not getting explicit confirmation from pretty pre/pro/AVR lighting re exactly what codec I'm getting.


Yes, T2 audio track matters can be confusing. It's for that reason that I'd advise caution coming to any conclusions based upon how Total Recall behaves. I note that Recall is DTS-HD High Resolution versus T2's DTS-HD Master Audio. I get your point but it's not a apples-to-apples comparison. Again, I'd spin a few Pixar BDs.

Finally, in a cheap gesture to getting back to topic, I don't think it's the case that Sony decks are ignoring ES flags. When I spin the T2 BD on the 470 (M04.R.708 fw) and select the DTS-HD MA track, my Denon 3803 sees the ES encoding, shows "ES MTRX" on its display and gives me surround back channel playback. I'm unfortunately using SPDIF since the 2010 Sonys don't have m.c. analog outs and the 3803 is non-HDMI (the Denon DBP-2011 is on my purchase horizon).

I suppose it's possible that changing only the connectivity to HDMI would produce a different result. But highly unlikely.

I am strongly thinking of upgrading my BDP-S350 for this as mine has no usb port for extra content and I don't want more equipment than what I have. If anyone here would be so inclined to specifically answer a couple questions I would be very greatful. I have all of my music in .WAV format and yes I know it isn't taggable. If you put a thumbnail in the folder called folder.jpg will the album art show up? I am assuming this plays regular WAV files created from my windows media player as LPCM 16bit 44100 khz? Is there gapless playback? And last but not least I have WMA VBRs of the exact same wav files but they are imbedded with the artwork ect will those play with artwork showing during play? I would really perfer to play wav's as they are lossless. Thanks.

New firmware released today. rM04.R.735:
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu...mdl=BDPS1700ES

Requests to download it lead to an http 403 page. Also it says will not be available for network upgrade until 12/16. I just tried again, same result (11:17am CST).

OK so that confirms that there was a bug in the original firmware, because Neo:6 is actually working as expected now. However in fixing that bug, I am still suspicous that they might have stripped out the DTS-ES capability from Master Audio all together.

I would still like to hear from anyone that is able to get DTS-ES in Master Audio with this disc (or any other disc). No question it works with core DTS.

As a side note, I also tested Crank which is labelled at PCM 6.1 - it shows up as PCM 7.1 on my Anthem.

Thanks,
Stefan

A DTS expert may chime in to flog this issue further but IMO it is counterintuitive to suspect that DTS-ES capability has somehow been gimped given my T2 DTS-ES results I described earlier. That would mean that the player is presenting the ES flag at one output but not another. As you may know, there is no separate DTS core track that's played for folks without full DTS-HD MA capability. That core is extracted on the fly from the DTS-HD MA. It doesn't make sense that the ES flag would be recognized for core extraction presented to the SPDIF but somehow disregarded/not recognized for full lossless presented via HDMI. It's the same laser reading the same data.

Where is Crank labeled 6.1? I don't have that disc anymore but a quick check of the back cover artwork at DVD Empire says only "PCM Audio (Uncompressed)" with no reference to the number of channels in the mix. In any event, all three discs you have mentioned testing are Lionsgate titles. Their authoring house may have practices/quirks that you're not going to be able to put into better context until you test other studios' titles on YOUR system. I've mentioned Pixar discs three times now and you haven't acknowledged that suggestion despite your apparently keen interest in this topic.

Hi, since no one responded and I searched the thread for an answer, I had to do the dreaded thing and call sony support to find out about WAV playback, they told me WAV files may be choppy on the player and if I wanted high quality music I should rip my music to MP3. So I am back here again after someone telling me MP3 is a higher quality than WAV I guess I know more than the supposed (Expert) I talked to. Can anyone please confirm if this player will playback WAV files without issue? It will be directly from an HDD 500gb to the player. I know wav files are supposed to be without gaps and hope they are on the player but the knowledge of what I am buying is more important to me than buying and having to return an item because I didn't know. Thanks for any info.

Apology for not following this thread continuously. During my test, I used a USB key with WAV files and the songs play flawlessly. As far as the "expert" saying that MP3 is "high quality",... Well, he needs to be re-educated.

Thank you for the reply. I did chuckle when the sony rep told me that and they asked what was so funny but I didn't have the heart to tell them that wav files are lossless and mp3 is udo compressed. lol. Anyhow I sincerely thank you and will now be buying the player as All I want is something to play my wav files and blu-rays. My wife will get my s350 which is still a perfect player for me but I want a Wav player too as I want my music at a touch of the finger not by pulling them out of the cases left and right. Do the wav files play back to back without spaces on the player? I just have some songs that go from one track to the next and they don't really break apart on the cd as it goes from slow instrumental music into fast stuff. Thanks again.

Unfortunately there is still gap between wav files.

Sony Store Online selling BDP-S770 for $249CA. Have not found any retailers listing this model yet!

http://www.sonystyle.ca/webapp/wcs/s...3&N=4294956703

has been in & out of stock most everywhere...got mine at vanns (2nd wave) now they are out again...

Sorry if this has been answered but I did not find it. When using Netflix can you select movies by category or must they be added to a que to show up on the 770?

Don't know if the Canadian Online Store will sell to the US, but is there not a US Sony Online Shop?

Confirmation of Crank 6.1/7.1 PCM here:
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/562/crank.html#Section4

Sorry I didn't clue in on the Pixar suggestions, I had thought their HD tracks were all straight 5.1. So I tried Toy Story 2 (5.1 ES) and got the same behavior as T2, which is no ES when the player is decoding.

As for bitstreaming I think you are right, it doesn't matter if you bitstream core DTS over S/PDIF or DTS-HD over HDMI. My problem is actually the unusual way in which the Anthem indicates DTS-ES Matrix (after reading the manual I discovered that they use NEO:6 to decode the matrixed back channel, and that's what gets displayed instead of DTS-ES).

Now, it looks like I was on to something with complexities in DTS-HD MA when decoded in the player. Apparently some players have "Master Audio Essential" or "Master Audio Limited":

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1077746

I wonder if the s770 is one. Based on my experience it could be, but not the s550.

I'm still wanting to know WHERE you're seeing 6.1--the onscreen display upon pressing "Display" during disc playback? Did you note the text of the review you linked to: The reviewer's receiver showed 7.1 also despite 6.1 disc labeling. It's probably just labeled wrong.


Not really "on to something" if indeed the Sonys have the Essentials decoder. My Oppo BPD-83 had one, too.

I picked one of these players up when it first came out.. Sat in a box up until yesterday when my display arrived. Updated the firmware.. Got a lot more media options now then before. Actively using Amazon VOD, Pandora, Slacker, Hulu Plus, some of the other free video services, VERY cool.. No need for a Roku or Apple TV now.. I played Toy Story 3 in it last night and the PICTURE WAS AMAZING. Wow. But I am sure that is a combo of both player and display (PN58C8000) fast load time, SACD capabilty (Although, I would run my 999ES over this unit anyday for SACD as the D/A converters and transport blow this model out of the water) BUT it does play SACD and over HDMI, good enough for the movie room..
I picked it up back then for $181 at E Expo.
Some of the Differences between this an the 570 are Wi-Fi, DLNA certification, Gracenote media database retrieval (for onscreen display of movie and CD cover art and disc data), and SACD playback. And as someone mentioned before, besides warranty and badge AND 3GB of add't memory, it is in line with the 1700ES..
It's a great player.. Better than any other I could find out there..

Any chance this player supports checkerboard 3D?

Frame sequential only. Checkerboard format never got picked up by the BDA.

Ok, I was interested in wav playback but since I have both wav and wma and could easily rip to aac/mp4. My question for this player is can this show artwork while playing wma or aac music files with the art embedded in the file itself? I have wma VBR but don't even know if it will play these or just plain old 320 max wma/AAC? Any info would help this again would be played from a HDD formatted in fat 32. I just want art with my music. Thanks.

Maybe im nuts....ive only owned the 770 for a few weeks now..but....I just preformed the newest update and it seems like the audio takes a while to kick in. For example if I have a movie paused for a few minutes and hit play..the movie will play then.............the auto kicks in. I have seen this issue before on other players. I just dont recall it before on this player. I was just wondering if the update slowed down the auto transfer. I am using a monster 1000 series hdmi to my onkyo 705 receiver.