So my kid bought me National Treasure 2 on Blu Ray for Father’s Day (such a precocious one-year old ;)) and it unfortunately only has Dolby TrueHD for the English audio track. I’ve got an older receiver that only does DD and DTS 5.1, connected to an X-Mystique via optical. The movie plays fine, but the sound is downsampled to PCM stereo . . . ugh.
So obviously I’m in the market for a newer receiver that supports TrueHD and DTS-MA. I think I’m okay in that department, I’m looking at an Onkyo 706(?) IIRC. The question is what to do about sound. I’m thinking I could just buy the new Asus HDAV audio card when it comes out as it’s supposed to do TrueHD and DTS-MA in hardware, but if I can do something more cost effective that might be better.
The only caveat I have is this – my TV maxes out at 720p over HDMI. The native res, 1366×768, is only achievable over the VGA connector. So I’d rather not go any route that requires me to run an HDMI cable with video and sound to the receiver, then the output back to the TV as 720p doesn’t look quite as crisp as native res.
For that reason, I’m hesitating on some of the motherboards with onboard HDMI. Even if they can passthru TrueHD and DTS-MA (is that even possible yet?) aren’t they going to require I use the HDMI video as well? Maybe not; my system has been working so nicely I’ve been slacking on my research as of late.
Any suggestions you can make that might save me some dough would be great! 😉 As it stands I’m looking at $700+ for the new receiver and sound card, which isn’t even released yet . . .
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