The amount of different multichannel and high-res audio codecs these days is staggering- I admit to not having kept up with it at all until moving into Meridian gear this past week. Being an analogue 2-Ch guy up til now made it largely irrelevant, as I'd just have the player itself decode to 2-Ch analogue out.

What really surprises me is that some of the highest quality formats like the newer movie multi-channel and SACD, etc, can only be output through HDMI, which I'd always been led to believe was an inherently jittery connection? Seems a shame the industry didn't either make HDMI so it carried a word clock channel, or just move over to balanced digital AES/EBU or something similar to Meridian's Speakerlink when they had a chance...

I guess I'm eventually going to be looking at something like an HD621+processor to get into multichannel world...

Last edited by 3dit0r; 2012-06-16 00:55.
HC: 861v4/ID40/LPS, DSP5000, DSP5000VC, DSP3100, SW1600, HD621, Oppo BDP-105, Sony VPL-HW55ES
2-Channel: Oppo BDP-105, TEAC VRDS-7/Trichord Clock 3/PSU, 551, Quad 303, Harbeth Compact 7ES-3, Kimber cables, Russ Andrews mains and supports.
Previous Meridian: 5000C, 5200SL, 7200.2, 6000, 562V.2, 568.2mm, 800v4, 808.2i, 818v2/v3, 861v8, 502