Does the Denon 5805 accept multichannel LPCM over HDMI?  

El Marko, go ahead and get it. It's part of the HDMI Spec to carry 1080P in addition to multichannel PCM audio as well. No company would be able to put it in their product lines if it could'nt.

This is from www.hdmi.org: (edited)

HDMI was defined to carry 8-channels of 192kHz, 24-bit uncompressed audio, which exceeds all current consumer media formats. In addition, most existing HDMI sources can output any compressed stream, and the newer sources can output uncompressed 6-channel, 96kHz audio from a DVD-Audio disk. There are A/V receivers on the market that can accept and process the 6- or 8-channel audio from HDMI.

There are a few receivers that simply pass HDMI without doing anything with the audio, or handle only 2.1 channels, or 5.1 channels, so not every HDMI receiver is created equal.

Works perfectly with Blue Ray or HD-DVD. The signal will show up as Multichannel direct and you can do any post processng and full bass management plus EQ.

James,

If I use the 7.1 analog connection between the 5805 and the Panny blue ray player, allowing the player to process the signal and convert it from digital to analog, can I still take advantage of the 5805's EQ processing, bass mgt and so on?

Panny has promised a firmware update for their player so it will be compatible with all the new audio codecs, including lossless. It appears that with the 5805 one must use the analog input to take advantage of this. But, if all the processing is lost I'm inclined to pass on the 5805 and wait for Denon to come out with HDMI 1.3 ready AVR's.

James,

If you use the analog 7.1 input to the 5805, you will still be able to use the 5805 EQ, bass mgt etc, provided you have selected the 'DSP mode' for the analog input in the setup.
The 5805 will convert the analog back to digital, do processeing etc, and convert back to analog, so there is an extra AD-DA conversion done.
If you do not enable the 'DSP mode', then rudimentary bass mgt. will still be done using analog filters, but not EQ processing, sound field processing etc. is possible.

Adri.

Why do you say this? What's wrong with the digital input? If the player's decoding the new codecs, you just need HDMI 1.1.

Companies do it routinely. There are plenty of HDMI equipped receivers and pre-pros that cannot pass 1080p and/or cannot accept multi-channel PCM.

The HDMI spec allows for lots of possibilities, but manufacturers don't have to implement all of those capabilities. For example: if you're manufacturing an HDMI equipped video scaler, you can leave off any or all of the audio capabilities (and any video capabilities you don't feel are necessary).

Sanjay