Thanks for passing along the e-mail, rduke. I can't claim to buy into Pioneer's reasoning, but perhaps second gen players will make the move up to 7.1 for analog outputs.

Obie_fl, you've got an excellent point - there was talk at one time about how the new formats would provide legacy support and I think I got it stuck in my head that they would do so by embedding a legacy track, but from a design standpoint that seems like a pretty foolish approach. Even with the new formats, the bit budget had to be considered, and tossing in duplicate data in a lesser format is pretty silly. It makes much more sense to require the players to generate a derived DD or DTS track from the DD+/DTS-HD source.

I've heard about the DD+-to-DTS trick on the Toshiba A1 (and presumably the XA1), and it certainly startled me the first time I saw it. Why use DTS? The only reasons that occur to me are either Toshiba is making use of the higher bit rates allowed by DTS or perhaps a real-time DTS encoder was easier to implement for some reason. I haven't gone hunting around AVS to see if anyone has identified the real reason.

We'll probably see HDMI 1.3 at some point in the next year or so, but I've seen several people point out that the "upgrade" to 1.3 will actually prevent the full degree of interactivity offered by both formats - the downloadable content that is supported apparently only works if the player handles the audio decoding. From that standpoint, leaving the trio of new decoders (DD+, DTS-HD, and TrueHD) in the player actually becomes preferable.