Onkyo 3300 and PS3 - Bitstream or LPCM?

[senthilsss]

I use my PS3 as BD, DVD, CD and MP3 player and quite disappointed first time when the sound from my "Avatar" BD sounded not so great. Tuned various parameters (actually switched off many in Receiver :lol and still I was not feeling comfortable.

I did a quick research in internet and found that PS3 supports two Audio output formats: Bitstream and LPCM.

(1) Bitstream sends the raw signals to AVR and it is AVR responsibility to detect and process it accordingly (Dolby PLII, DTS etc.,)
(2) LPCM option - PS3 automatically coverts the o/p to 5.1 and sends the signal to AVR

Most of the posts in the internet suggested LPCM as opposed to Bistream as why unnecessarily feed Raw signal and then covert to 5.1 in AVR.

However, looking further deeper..I found that Bistream is the right option if you are playing BD movies as the audio stream is not compressed and send as is (Avatar was in Dolby True HD and DTS HD) so the player gets maximum work but also get those uncompressed GBs of digital signals.

LPCM on other hand is a compressed 5.1 form to AVR from PS3.

I tested this by watching the same scene in Avatar and found "Bistream" indeed was better. So, I left that option as it is and decided that my AVR do all the processing based on the input it receives.

Anybody have similar experience? Please share your thoughts.

 

[venkatcr]

Both Bitstream and LPCM are digital streams. Where you process the data depends upon the capabilities of the player and the receiver. If the player has better processing capability in terms of decoding, LPCM will be the better option. If the receiver has better decoding or is more modern, of course bitstream will be better.

But remember, either way, the conversion to analogue is done by the receiver, and that is what will make a tremendous. if you really want to know which is better, you should compare a digital stream with a multi channel analogue stream.

Cheers

 

[senthilsss]

Thanks Venkat!

However, I am bit confused after reading your reply.

<SNIP>
If the player has better processing capability in terms of decoding, Bitstream will be the better option. If the receiver has better decoding or is more modern, of course LPCM will be better.
</SNIP>

I thought the Bistream means the player will send raw signals to receiver, and receiver decodes the raw signals and converts to analog using its microprocesser.

LPCM means that the signals are already decoded by player and it sends the appropriate compressed digital signals to receiver, and receiver just convert to analog and play.

Because, when I mark the option "Bitstream" - AVR lights up input as "Dolby True HD" where as when I mark the option "LPCM" - AVR lights up input as "LPCM 5.1".

I thought you would suggest to keep Bistream in PS3 for BD movies.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

 

[venkatcr]

Sorry. I inter changed the terminologies. I have corrected my post.

Cheers

 

[senthilsss]

Thanks once again!

In between, I did some more digging and found a nice article in the internet for setting up PS3 Slim.
Click here to read Bitstream or LPCM for PS3?