Connecting audio to your Blu Ray DVD player

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Great instructions from Robert Silva at about.com’s home theater area.

With the Blu-ray Disc Players currently on the market, as soon as you connect the Blu-ray Disc Player to your HDTV or video projector, and turn both units on (set the TV to the input you have the Blu-ray Disc Player connected to), the Blu-ray Disc Player will automatically adjust to the native resolution capabilities of your HDTV or video projector.

In other words, a Blu-ray Disc Player knows what it is connected to and what type of connection you are using. If it doesn’t sense a 1080p input, it will set itself to whatever the native resolution of the set is - whether it be 1080i, 720p, etc… Afterwards, you can still go into the Blu-ray Disc Player setup menu and make any additional changes you choose (if you prefer 1080i, 720p, etc..). NOTE: Check your user manual if you suspect any variations to the above information.

However, even if you have an HDTV or video projector with 720p native resolution, instead of 1080i or 1080p, I have found that if you manually set the Blu-ray Disc player to 1080i, the image looks slightly better.

This may be due to the fact that the Blu-ray Discs themselves are mastered at 1080p, and it appears that is easier for the Blu-ray disc player to scale down to output a 1080i signal than a 720p signal, since 1080i is closer 1080p than 720p. Of course, the other explanation is that Blu-ray Disc Players may just not have very good built-in 720p scaling capability.

Audio Configuration
As far as the audio output of the Blu-ray Disc player goes, it is still easiest to use the traditional method of connecting the digital audio outputs (either optical or coaxial) of the player to your AV receiver.

However, if you have a set of 5.1 channel direct analog inputs on your receiver, this is an even better option, as the 5.1 channel analog outputs of the Blu-ray disc player already contain a decoded surround sound signal.

Also, if you have higher-end AV receiver that has direct HDMI inputs (that are not just simply pass through connections), your AV receiver would be able to accept the ucompressed digital audio signal from the Blu-ray Disc player, which is even a better than using the 5.1 channel analog signal or the digital audio signal input options. Consult your AV Receiver user manual to see if any HDMI inputs are pass-through only, or if the receiver can decode the audio signal properly.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 9:51 am and is filed under Components. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.