Gamer or not, the PS3 is quite a good Blu-ray player and it also has excellent credentials as a home media center, with the ability to play audio, video and image files, and to stream media from a UPnP server. At the price of $399 for the 40GB version (which will be expanded to 80GB in a new PS3 model to be released in the Fall), it is really hard to beat, even if you never play a single game on it.

That Home Entertainment Magazine article deserves very close analysis. I honestly think that DTS and Dolby stacked the deck in those tests. Note that the sample audio they chose featured very sparse audio textures: a little dialog, a couple of instruments. That kind of texture is not difficult to compress. Where lossy compression schemes are a liability is in dense audio textures in which the compression scheme starts throwing away ambience and inner details that it assumes won't easily be heard.

In tests that Soundhound and I did in his studio years ago, comparing DTS and Dolby DD5.1 tracks, the difference between those two -- and what they threw away -- was quite easy to hear. And, of course, the audio quality of any compressed track pales compared to the original, uncompressed audio stems such as Soundhound could play from his ProTools console.

I welcome the new, lossless schemes. Their increased quality is readily apparent--even the comparatively limited improvement of DD+--and is as important an addition to HD disc as the increased pixel resolution, IMO.