Although requiring an additional cable connection, this type of setup will provide access to all available surround sound audio formats that employed by the Blu-ray Disc and DVD formats, as well as all audio from CDs and other program content. In this type of setup, the Blu-ray Disc player will do all the needed audio decoding of any Dolby TrueHD and/or DTS-HD Master Audio Blu-ray soundtracks and pass those signals to the receiver as uncompressed PCM signals. The sound quality will be the same as if the decoding had been done by the receiver, you just won’t see the surround sound format labels displayed on the home theater receiver’s front panel display – it will display PCM instead. The downside of this option is that it results in more cable clutter than you might like. Using this connection option, you will only be able to access standard Dolby Digital and DTS signals. You won’t be able to access the Dolby TrueHD/Atmos or DTS-HD Master Audio/DTS:X surround sound formats. However, the options illustrated above do require one, or more, extra connections to your setup, as well as a possible limitation on what surround sound formats you may be able to access on a non-3D AV receiver.
