**Official Toshiba HD-A35 (ONLY) Thread** - Page 160

but there are 18 for sale by others. I stopped selling on amazon because people order them and then complain when they don't play on their dvd players and I have to refund the money and eat the shipping, especially for heavier box sets that amazon doesn't credit you enough.

Well my HD-A35 finally arrived. Much to my disappointment it was an A30 so I sent it back . Now looking for another A35 for sale. Anyone have one lying around that they would like to sell?

pm sent

Co-sign to this. I've been looking and the only ones I can seem to find are price-gouged to beat the dickens are are packaged with a boatload of movies that I don't want on auction sites. I just want one A-35 for some of that good ol' bitstreaming. Not that I don't like my A3 or A20. I just wanna be flying the flagship.

As soon as I get a chance I will be putting up 2-A35/1 Onkyo 805/1 Toshiba HD-XA2/1-A2/1 Xbox HD-DVD drive and 150 movies at least 50 unopened.
Would like to sell local so who ever purchases them can test them out all in perfect condition with boxes and accessories.
Will try to get to it soon.

Right on. I can't wait to tell my wife about this. She's gonna be thrilled, man.

yellowcanary73,

Please let us know when this is going to happen. +1 on the bistreaming!

I picked up an A35 on ebay last week. It has firmware 2.0, I downloaded the 4.0 firmware from toshiba and burned the iso on a cd. When I try to update the players firmware, it recognizes the disc, asks me if I want to update my firmware, then instead of going off the disc it trys to download it online. Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

I never had this problem but mine is not connected to the Internet. Try disabling all the network features including Internet firmware update if there is such an option.

Did you go into the setup meny when trying to update? You are not supposed to go into the setup menu when you update the firmware from a CD. Just put the disc in the player and answer Yes to update.

Ya that's what I did but it tries to update it online. I haven't had any issues with 2.0 so I guess its not a big deal.

Is the ethernet cable connected? If so, try physically removing it from the A35.

No its not connected, that's why it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Can I ask how you see that it is trying to update online? Does it say downloading or something like that?

My new, to me, HD-A35 arrived today. Updated, by disc, and checked it out tonight and everything seems OK. I know it's petty but now the little blue light is on and all is well. I'll keep my A3 as a back up since it is worth next to nothing. Some day I may upgrade my HD DVDs to Blu-ray but not today. Looks and sounds awesome.

OH yeah!

I expect you will find in the great majority of cases that replacing your HD-DVD with a Blu-ray of the same title is not an upgrade at all. Most of the time you get the exact same video, and possibly a lossless audio track that doesn't sound much different from the HD-DVD. Better to spend your money on a HD title that you don't have yet.

Funny you should mention that. I just bought The Last Samurai and The Complete Matrix Trilogy for $13 and that included shipping.

I've found that that's true for most movies but I did keep both versions (HD DVD and Blu-ray) of "End of Days" because the audio is different and the extra's seem to be different as well.

Deleted.

I guess that I haven't heard yet... just picked up an A2 with 14 movies for $18!

OK, the drive is a little cranky according to the previous owner, but still plays HD-DVD's but not CD/DVD's , but hey that's OK, I have another A2 that starts up but won't load, I think that it is time to swap some parts...

I bought a new XA2 as well as A35 back in the day. The only disc so far the XA2 doesn't want to play is Phantom of the Opera. It freezes up around 30 minutes in requiring a power-off, but the A35 is fine with it.

Houston, we have a problem . . .
My primary A35 has suddenly decided it does not like to play bitstreamed Dolby TrueHD tracks without frequent brief audio dropouts.
All other bitstreamed tracks play just fine. If I set the player to convert everything to bitstreamed lpcm, it still plays fine, including with a Dolby TruedHD track selected from the title being played. I have unpluggged/plugged hdmi cables, swapped to different hdmi plugs on the receiver, swapped and used different hdmi cables to no avail.
My blu-ray player bitstreams all lossless audio just fine - as does my other A35 which I dragged out of the closet to test with. My player also exhibits no symptoms of the drive going south (ie. it plays video and all other audio perfectly including reading the TrueHD track since it converts it to lpcm just fine when set that way). I have convinced myself it is definitely the player. But it seems so strange to have this problem ONLY with Dolby TrueHD. Has anyone else experienced anything similar? Any ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks.
Updated: DTS-HD Master suffers from dropouts also with this player. DD+ works just fine, as does LPCM. Is the increased bandwidth of lossless audio suddenly the issue? But isn't lpcm also lossless when the source selected off the disc is Dolby TrueHD? Confusing.

more info . . .
I opened up the A35 today - the fan works fine, no obvious signs of damage or overheating inside. I also opened up an A30 to compare - interesting - they are pretty much identical (exact same main board, power supply board & drive) - except for the output analog section in the A35 being populated with components while empty in the A30, and a couple of chips look like maybe different models. I've attached a picture of one of the chips. Do any of you electronic experts know what the purpose of that black material that has been melted, flowed onto the connectors for this chip, and let dry/harden? Is this some sort of solderless electronic board connection?

That stuff is just there to stabilize the chip itself. Non conductive (and non removable).

I was sort of looking for things that might cause intermittent noise or brief disconnects, etc. in the lossless audio stream in the player - hence me wondering about stuff on the board that might be problematic.

btw . . can anyone confirm for me that if I set the hdmi output on the player to bitstream lpcm, that the player does, in fact send lossless audio down the line from Dolby TrueHD sources? The spec's seem to suggest that. I do not believe it has the ability to decode DTS lossless to lpcm and bitstream it down the hdmi line, however (the book says you get DTS core only). The audio dropouts only occur when I am bitstreaming native lossless audio down hdmi. If I set it to lpcm output, no dropouts occur even when selecting Dolby TruedHD. If I'm still getting lossless Dolby TrueHD via lpcm, I'm only giving up lossless on my handful of DTS/MA discs with this problem (one of which is the Eagles concert HD-DVD, however . . . grrrrr . . .).
Thanks.

Yes you'll get lossless that way with Dolby, and IIRC in one of the firmware upgrades you can now get the same with DTS HD Master.

The A-series players were still, relatively speaking, a work in progress at the time of their discontinuation (as far the firmware is concerned). As HDMI wasn't completely standardized back then, the A35's firmware does not always play nice with every HDMI-equipped receiver, particularly some of the slightly older models. (This, of course, could also be said of many bitstream-capable BD players of the day.) Had the format been allowed to flourish, I've no doubt that the operational quirks would have been worked out.

That being said, there is a certain level of playback inconsistency with these players, again typical of a technology that hadn't quite reached maturity. There are those who swear by firmware version 2.7, for instance, and have rolled back their subsequent f/w updates, refusing to ever perform another update. On the other hand, v4.0 has been a godsend to many (myself included). It's possible you either may be having handshake issues between the player/receiver/TV or there could be an issue with your HDMI cable. The discs themselves are notoriously fragile, and there could be minor scratches on them that are wreaking havoc with your bitstreaming consistency. I had similar high-res bitstreaming drop out issues with all firmware versions above 2.7 and below 4.0; with 4.0, playback of all audio streams have performed flawlessly provided I take care to recognize and abide by the proper turn-on sequence relative to my individual setup (this can vary from setup to setup). Moreover, I will have bitstreaming issues even today if I change any of the audio settings during the course of viewing a movie. In order to prevent audio drop outs, I have to treat the player as though I were making certain settings changes on my PC: do a complete restart, which will require starting an HD DVD title from the beginning. If I don't do the restart, playback for me will be very unreliable. So I don't do much in the way of settings experimentation any more; I set and forget.

Noise, on the other hand, would seem to convey some sort of mechanical issue (the fan wearing out or perhaps a failing drive that's having trouble reading high-res tracks for streaming), so it's quite understandable that you would explore the inside for any obvious issues. I have noticed that over time my A35 isn't as quiet as it was in the beginning (whereas my A20, which isn't bitstream capable was always dead-silent). But the slightly elevated operational noise is pretty much a non-issue for me, as the player is kept in a component rack with doors (ventilated in the rear, of course).

Regarding your audio settings, I can confirm that if you set HDMI audio out to PCM, it .will decode the high-res audio internally and output the decoded signal to your receiver as multi-channel PCM. You'll still be getting high-res audio, only decoded by the player instead of the receiver. (Won't get into any debates with anyone as to which sounds better; go with whichever sounds best to you and your ears.) With DTS HD MA, however, the player will extract the standard/lossy (core) DTS signal only and output it as PCM to the receiver as it does with the lossless audio track.

Not sure if any of this information will be a definitive solution for you, but hopefully it gives you an overview of what you might be dealing with.


No firmware update has ever been released by Toshiba to enable full internal DTS-HD MA decoding, at least not domestically.

I don't know that a definitive answer is in your commentary - however - it was VERY informative and I appreciate the time and trouble you took to provide it. The A35 in question has been operating perfectly for quite some time - until this problem started. It actually developed slowly while watching a particular Warner title. The Dolby TrueHD track played perfectly for 90% of the movie, then slowly developed more and more dropouts towards the end of the film. Now, all lossless audio tracks suffer from frequent dropouts - but every other selected audio works fine (including bitstreamed pcm with TrueHD selected for playback). So something must be failing or seeing interference specifically in the native bitstream path for lossless audio. I guess I'll keep playing around for a while before swapping it out for my other A35 which still works correctly. Thanks again for your comments and expertise.

Can someone post any knowledge of the audio DAC in the HD-A3? I intended to use one that I own as a CD only player in a mid-fi component system (analog over RCA or PCM out over TOSLink), but newer players like the Panasonic BD-85 (with their own proprietary DAC) are distinctly more neutral and better sounding. I was doing some A/B tests between the 2 players today, and concluded that the A3 will not be good for 'audio only' duty. Any thoughts/comments?

Well, this is the A35 ONLY thread, but I digress...

If you want a superior audio only player (CD player), the A35/XA2 are the ONLY units of choice. The DAC in the A3 is minimal at best and one of the reasons it was the entry level model.