The macroblocking issue that I get from HD over sat is really sickening. Hey, I love my HD, I just hate when the "suspension of reality" has to end so abruptly when the screen breaks up into squares. This is something that a physical disk, and hopefully less compression is expexted to fix...
I expect even the common man with a cable or sat HD connection sees and notices. We call it, allong with reduced res: "HDlite"

Agreed. Moving from VHS to DVD was a paradigm shift in home video. Everything was different: quantity (extras), quality (digital sound & picture), convenience (everything we'd gotten used to with CDs), price (better than VHS and laserdisc), etc.

There is no such shift when moving to the HD formats; just incrementally better sound and picture (for folks that have the equipment to appreciate it).

Aside from the format war, there seem to be so many self-made problems that I wonder if folks will put up with them. Something as simple as listening to the audio means that two components have to hand-shake and exchange secret words for security. God forbid your receiver doesn't identify itself as a HDMI repeater, end of conversation and the player doesn't send any video and audio to you receiver. This is already happening with some set top boxes and HDMI equipped receivers.

Depending on which camp you listen to, the video signal may or may not be dumbed down to standard def for the component outputs. Too bad for HD sets without HDMI inputs. If you wait for HDMI 1.3 based gear, so you can transfer Dolby's codecs natively for decoding in the receiver, then you don't get the interactive features that come with decoding the bitstream in the player. However, DTS recently said that they don't want decoding done in the player. (Amazing how that company always manages to shoot itself in the foot.) One of the security measures BluRay proposed to the industry is to have the player connected via phone line.

I could go on but would end up popping a blood vessel. In any case, the whole approach is of treating the customer like the enemy. Much of this happened with the hi-rez audio formats: paranoia prevented a standardized interface from being adopted across the industry. If the industry is sooooo reluctant to give us high resolution video and audio, why do they bother in the first place. Lots of reasons to be pessimestic about the new formats. Personally, I'll wait for some of the dust to settle before investing.

I'm prepared to wait for years--if ever. If they don't get over it and give us user-friendly value, why buy it? Who really really needs it anyway? I see two customers: early adopters who always want the latest technology, and poor unsuspecting consumers who get taken to the cleaners by salesmen. The rest of us would be wise to sit this one out for a while.

no one ever said progress/advancement would be easy or perfect. naturally there are going to be lots of issues with a new technology and to adopt early would be silly. companies rush to develop new technologies and then work out the details later. once its out there, then it is easier to fix. or if it is garbage, then they can move on without having spent too much on fixing an inferior idea. ideas/advancements fall by the wayside all the time, particulary ones that consumers are confused about, are too expensive, or just suck.

my point is that we should embrace that companies are at least trying to put out better products instead of resting on their laurels.

The fact that we are here and not at a Bose forum speaks to the fact that we embrace companies that are trying to put out better products.

I don't think that companies are necessarily rushing to get HD DVD or Blueray out because they are better products. They are trying to regain the margins they get from first adopters who are willing to shell out big money for the latest and greatest, vs the rest of us who wait for technologies to develop to where the products that use them are commodities and thus much more affordable.

And certainly the studios and media owners, in general, are not embracing the idea of putting out better products, otherwise they wouldn't be insisting on sticking DRM everywhere they can to make consumers' lives harder but do nothing to stop piracy.

Then there's the fact that HDMI isn't a very good standard either. Then again it is based on DVI that apparently is a pretty crappy standard as well, but at least it has better connectors.

i was referring to the topic of this thread specifically - dolby and dts technology, not hardware.

The whole "HD war" is all so much hype anyway. The various players in the market are so fractured and focused on infighting that it is going to be years before any clear winner shakes out. In the meantime, the hardware manufacturers are tying to prime the pump by strong-arming the studios into releasing some content and by trying to keep consumers on the enddless upgrade train with equipment, much of which will end up being incompatible with eachother. Given that landscape, it's seems rather pointless to play the game at this juncture.

Personally, the only useful development to come out of all this is the order of magnitude increase in data storage on new DVD media. That will be a real boon to computer storage/backups, where you don't have to worry about replacing your entire computer system to take advantage of the increased storage capacity.

Cheers,

To return to the original topic of the thread, both the Dolby and DTS HD systems should be capable of producing awesome sound. I hope some media provider starts producing concerts and other listening content. The 990 has 7.1 analog inputs that should handle the players analog out quite well--at least I find analog out from my Denon 3910 is pretty much indistinguishable from the digital out with 990 processing. So there is hope for the new formats--it's just that I don't want to reward the industry by choosing a format in this war. You gotta wonder though with 90% of the world listening to down-rezed MP3 music if HD music will really sell.

Ditto, ditto, ditto, and more ditto! Being the proud (?) owner of the last generation of HDTV without DVI or HDMI, I will not be an early adopter in the near future. Until the new audio formats are on movie disks and are decodable by players, receivers and preamps, and the studios come to their senses about the copy-protection paranoia, all the HD movie disks and players that are sold in the next 1-2 years of either format will be transitional products. Early adopters will be buying both disks and players that will be obsolete (or at least odd) in some way in a couple of years one way or another. I agree with Sanjay that for an overwhelmingly large fraction of the market HD disks are an incremental improvement over current DVDs, pretty much like SACD and DVD-A are seen as not worth it by most. In the last few months it seems that locally DVD-As are disappearing from store shelves, but SACDs seem to still be hanging on. Anyone else notice this? Many stores are also mixing SACDs and DVD-As with CDs on the shelves, so it makes it difficult to browse for SACDs and DVD-As.

Exactly, your average "Joe Sixpack" seems to be perfectly happy with 128k AAC or MP3 stereo audio. People are lapping up the ipod.

Until there is some bona fide standards and interoperability, I suspect the HD game (if it ever really takes off at the consumer level) is going to be relegated to rather expensive higher end manufacturers catering to people with a lot of discretionary spending power. It's only when the mass production manufacturers start seeing real market opportunity that any affordable gear will be available. Until that time, your reliance on the analog inputs seems to be the safest haven.

The thing that drives me really crazy is that all of this copy protection crap doesn't inconvenience pirates in the slightest, but creates headaches for consumers who legitimately buy the content. When I was in Beijing a few weeks ago, you could buy currently running theater titles (including movies that had only opened in the week or two prior in the US) on the street for 10-20RMB, or about $1.25-$2.50. That included rather professional packaging. I doubt that will change anytime soon. And that was within blocks of Tiananmen Square and many of the government's official buildings. That's like being able to buy pirated movies across the street from the White House.