Will I lose any audio quality going HDMI from blu ray to tv and fiber optic cable from tv to receiver? ?

Question

I think the question states what I'm asking pretty well...I am running an HDMI from my blu ray to my HD TV and then running my fiber optic cable from my TV to my receiver on my surround sound and was wondering if I was gonna lose any audio quality...I mean I'm taking a digital signal through digital cables, so I dont think it would be a big effect or should I buy another fiber optic cable and run it from my blu ray to my receiver?

Thanks

Answer 1

All things being equal, you shouldn't lose any excessive signal quality with that setup. Both HDMI and optical, like you said, carry digital signal. You will have some loss, when the signal gets converted to optical, by the TV, but you will have about the same loss just from the TV processing the signal for speaker output or for passthrough. The biggest factor in this equation is the processing quality of the TV. I would actually use the second method, optical Blu-Ray to optical in receiver. This will bypass the TV conversion completely, since any time you convert a signal from one type to another, you get some loss and a delay is imposed. The delay can be annoying if it is more than a few  milliseconds, because you can't consciously tell the difference between lips moving and hearing the voice, but your subconscious catches it and it nags at the back of your mind.

You can go either way, but if quality is THAT important, and you're willing to spend the bucks to get another optical cable, the more direct the path, the better.

Answer 2

Yeah, you probably will.

Will it matter? Maybe, maybe not... it depends on your receiver.

A Blu-Ray player can output very high quality audio over HDMI... often up to eight channels (7.1 surround sound) in uncompressed PCM audio, as well as some of the newer high resolution compressed formats (some Blu-Ray players can convert everything to PCM, others pass a bitstream out for your receiver to decode).

The standard Sony/Philips optical interface (via TOSlink connectors, basically an optical version of the coaxial S/PDIF standard) can support only two channels of PCM, or 5.1 via a compressed format like AC3 or DTS. Some Blu-Ray players, such as the Sony PS3, will re-encode your Blu-Ray audio in AC3 to output to a receiver capable of handling optical but not HDMI output.

Now, assuming that's what your receiver supports, you can't really get better audio unless both your Blu-Ray player AND your receiver support 5.1 or 7.1 channel analog connections. If you have no way of taking advantage of the higher quality Blu-Ray audio, you don't lose anything just going to optical.

HOWEVER, many TVs don't really deal well with surround sound over HDMI. It's quite possible that your TV will just send stereo, or stereo with the old Dolby "fake back channel" trick, over the optical output. You would certainly get full surround sound out of over-the-air TV shows.

This is exactly the case with my Samsung HDTV... some Blu-Ray formats confuse it over HDMI entirely, others get passed on as stereo, I don't recall every getting real multichannel. In my old configuration, I did this -- I was using the TV for all video switching, and the default setup on my amp played back from the TV. This way, anyone could set any source on the TV and get SOMETHING. I has separate inputs on the amp with direct digital links from my satellite STB and from my DVD player.

Once I got the PS3, I upgraded to a receiver with HDMI I/O (and not just HDMI switching... watch out for that too... older "HDMI" amps only switch the HDMI, they don't accept the digital from HDMI as a real input). So now I have the PS3 and the STB feeding HDMI to the amp, the amp to the TV (OTA isn't much of an issue in my area, and the STB has an OTA tuner anyway, so I'm not worried about audio from the TV, but that could be done with a separate input on the receiver).

You would have to test your specific TV and amp to see if you get real surround sound (mine old unit lit up a blue light and either AC3 or DTS indicators for full surround sound, and showed little icons for the channels driven). You can probably get optical or coaxial digital directly from your Blu-Ray player.. that's guaranteed to sound at least as good as the TV's passthrough. And of course, you'll have to figure out which formats your Blu-Ray player supports that way.. some may require external decoders (last I checked, the PS3 was the only unit on the market that did on-board decoding of all Blu-Ray formats, but there are bound to be others sooner or later).