I will also be interested in seeing what happens with audio only formats such as SACD-2 and DVD-Audio, er, DD lossless. DVD-Audio format had a portion for DVD-V to display still shots... I wonder what the plan is going to be for Dolby Digital Lossless (DVD-Audio) on Bluray... Now that there is agreement for mandatory support of DVD-Audio on Bluray, what can we expect from DVD-Audio 2 (Dolby Digital Lossless)? We need to standardize multichannel audio now that we have room for as many channels and bandwidth as needed. No more limitations from the DVD format. I will be anxious to see what develops.

I think that although many channels could be supported, that both DTS and Dolby lossless will audio will be limited by the Bluray/HDMI spec to 8 channels. Can we have both flexibility and standardization of multichannel audio in the future? How will Bob Katz (Chesky), Micheal Bishop (Telarc), and all the other recording engineers see eye to eye on multichannel. I know that many engineers made 'sacrifices' based on the limitation of 5-6 channels with DVD-Audio. Perhaps now that we can have at least 8 channels, there can be standardization of a center channel in all surround formats. But assuming you have 8 audio channels to play with, what would be your vision of an ideal standardized surround format? How many channels would your ideal surround format involve, possibly greater than eight? At the very least, I hope a center channel in all future multichannel music. There also has to be some concordance with speaker positioning for home theater, as most people have enough trouble maintaining a dedicated home theater, let alone a separate multichannel music room. Would love to hear your thoughts...

[This message has been edited by Health Nut (edited 03-08-2005).]

7.1 System