Pioneer Blu Ray Player BDP 05 FD

I would be careful with what Pioneer customer support says regarding DTS MA not being sent to the analog outs. Experience has shown that CSRs are often not up to date on future plans. You might want to post the results of your call on avsforum, as the people there follow this situation very closely. I do not remember anyone there saying that DTS MA would not go out over the analog outputs. If that is true, there will be a lot of upset people. I believe the manual reference to 5.1 applies to the current situation with DTS not necessarily the future implementation of DTS HD MA.

Hi - Just a FYI for those who own the BDP 95FD - There is a firmware update that will bring the player to the latest 3.30 version - makes the player much faster - That is a lot less time for the movie to begin - also corrects some compatibility issues with certain Blue Rays. Some features offered on the newest Blue Rays were causing a compatibility issues - the latest update corrects that. The new player looks to be very cool but i'll be enjoying what I have for now...TONY

"I believe the manual reference to 5.1 applies to the current situation with DTS not necessarily the future implementation of DTS HD MA."

The manual states that it can already decode DTS HD MA, and it shows it as 5.1 via the analog outs. What I mean is that the manual is already written as if the updates are installed. As far as the Pioneer CSRep saying it will not ouput DTS HD MA through the analogs; I dont believe it. But I dont think it will do all 8 channels. I hope it will, or you are right. People will be upset.

I was wondering if anyone ever tried upgrading the power cord on one of these players for better sonics? I did this with my cd player and found it made an improvement.

Unfortunately, Pioneer has not been very forthcoming on the details of their plans for decoding DTS MA internally. My experience is that manuals are often not written carefully enough to be definitive, unfortunately. The phrase in the footnote in the manual for DTS HD MA over analog is "DTS Surround Sound signals converted to linear PCM audio signals are output". They use the term "DTS Surround Sound" elsewhere in the table to reference lossy DTS signals, not MA signals. That would imply that for DTS HD MA sources, DTS lossy is output over the analogs. I just find that hard to believe and I think you agree. Note the HDMI column explicitly says that DTS HD MA is output. I would expect that same phrase for the analog column, not the DTS Surround Sound phrase. My guess is they carried some of that wording over from the similar table for the 95, which did not decode DTS MA internally. With these problems in the table, I would also not trust that the 5.1 reference is accurate. I think we need to wait for some official word from Pioneer or the actual firmware before we can be sure of this. I like Pioneer products, but they are having a tough time with some of the details on this one. Hopefully, it is just start-up pains for the new platform.