I've been doing a bit of reading about this player. It's the first standalone player I've seen that I feel like I might be willing to spend some money on.

Interesting thing about this player: they omitted any onboard decoding of TrueHD or DTS-HD (and possibly DD+). The player will be able to output the bitstreams for the new audio formats - I've even seen one review where someone was able to do just that with both TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio tracks. To do so, though, it will come at the expense of any interactive content that requires mixing audio streams. As this is a feature that seems to have been less used on Blu-ray than on HD-DVD, I'm not sure that it will be all that much of an issue. And in those rare cases where it is used, there will likely be a fall-back option of a legacy audio track such as Dolby Digital (which the player can decode internally) to use in conjunction with the secondary audio track. When trying to work through all the different scenarios in my mind, I decided that I'd be willing to step down to a core DD track for the movie if I was watching some bonus content that was going to distract from the movie itself anyway. If I'm listening to the lossless formats, I'm doing so specifically to watch the movie, not to listen to a commentary track alongside the movie.

Both HD formats have provisions for interactive content that allows two audio streams to be overlayed. The most obvious example for any HD-DVD owners is the menu structure on most of Universal's discs: a bar appears at the bottom of the screen and allows access to different features (audio settings, subtitle settings, scene selection, special features) while the movie plays in the background. These menus include audio cues (it beeps when you move the cursor), which are mixed in with the soundtrack for the movie. To achieve this, the soundtrack must be decoded internally so the player can add in the beeps. It then outputs multichannel PCM via HDMI, multichannel analog (if the player supports it), or it re-encodes the PCM to DTS and outputs via optical or coaxial digital. The XA2 is the first HD-DVD player to be HDMI v1.3 and (thanks to a firmware update recently) to support bitstream output of TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, but if those bitstreams are output then the menu won't beep. There were reports very early on that in order to insure the interactive content would always worked, some or even all HD-DVD's were being authored with a flag that would prevent bitstream output and instead force internal decoding.