Been away from the Salon for a few months, but now am on the verge of jumping into a new flat panel and Blu-ray player. While shopping for TV & player I realized I needed to bone-up on how the audio will be handled considering that I, like Gonk have a collection of SACD's & DVA's played through my Pioneer DV-45A using the 5.1 analog output direct into the 990. Gonk, your web site was very helpful in trying to understand my options for handling the DD+ and TrueHD based on your BD30 setup.

My questions focus on if there are any choices in new BD players, (Sep 08) that I should consider that would make my new setup work optimally? I won't be able to afford a HDMI capable processor upgrade any time soon once the panel and player are purchased (leaning toward 50" Pioneer Elite Plasma), so will need to make do with the 990's HDMI shortcomings.

I must admit, I get lost in the, "...For Digital Audio Output, I changed each option from PCM to Bitstream. This means that Dolby Digital and DTS signals are not decoded internally. It also means that Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, and DTS-HD bitstreams (up to and including DTS-HD Master Audio) would be passed as bitstreams via HDMI if I were using the HDMI connection for audio. Since I'm not doing that, each of those cases ends up passing a core bitstream of basic Dolby Digital or DTS via the optical output. If I were to leave these set to the default of PCM, the BD30 would decode the Dolby Digital and DTS signals and output as multichannel PCM, but it would only output PCM stereo from the optical connection. It would also decode only the core DD or DTS bitstream to prodice the multichannel PCM delivered to the HDMI output...." jargon, (quote from Gonk's BD30 review)

But through all this techno stuff, I'm thinking I should be looking for a particular BD player(s) that will give me processing/audio output without being able to use the HDMI audio feature. I assume some sacrifices will be inevitable.

Any suggestions in this regard would be appreciated.