Jerry,

"As to the compressed soundtracks, if its regular DD, I think Id prefer the Meridian to decode it but I think many discs will now feature the high res sound............."

Will the Meridian accept/decode bitstream on its 3x SPDIF inputs? I thought it was basically expecting PCM when configured in that manor?

With my board tapped into the signal feeding the DACs you get PCM output all the time. If one really wanted bitstream for DD/DTS it would be easy enough to simply use the players stock SPDIF output into another input on the Meridian for that.

"One thing I like about my XA1 player is it will take a True HD track and downsample it to DTS 1.5 so it works over SPDIF to the 861. Sounds great when compared to the standard DD track."

Sounds better when you don't lossy recompress the lossless track at all though. wink

Shawn

.