HDTV Forum

Audio compatibility

HDMI's audio capabilities vary, depending on which HDMI standard is employed. While these are developing all the time, at the time of writing (01/12/05), the situation is as follows:

V1.0 - two-channel PCM audio up to 48kHz/24-bit including standard Dolby 5.1 and DTS 5.1 bitstreams.
V1.1 - up to 8-channel PCM audio up to 192kHz/24-bit.
V1.2 - as V1.1, plus DSD audio (for SACD) at 1.824Gb/s.
V1.3 - (proposed) as above, plus Dolby Digital+ and DTS-HD enhanced audio.

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HDMI carries the digital video and audio on a single slim cable that has huge data capacity.

With DVD Audio, the Denon player decodes the signal and sends out all the channels digitally (at their sampling frequency of 96 or 192kHz), which means the full speaker set-up capabilities of the player work.

But this doesn't work for SACD. Sony hasn't approved the copy-protection system in HDMI, so you need an analogue connection for SACD.

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