Ears On

After more than a year of relentless lobbying, I've finally both HD DVD and Blu-ray players in my rack. Since my home/office cave is but a minor outpost of the Home Theater Magazine empire, this took a fair amount of begging and pleading. Thanks to Toshiba for the second-generation HD-A2, and to Pioneer--by way of video editor Geoff Morrison--for the BDP-HD1. I installed them on the shelf that sits between my receiver slots, with the Rotel RSX-1065 above and various guest receivers below. Naturally I the first thing I wanted was to see video in each format. Would my Sharp LC-32D4U 32-inch LCD HDTV (768p) and LG RL-JA20 LCD front-projector (720p) deliver pictures that would justify adding new HD signal sources to the rack? Even with the Sharp's sometimes iffy conversion to its native resolution of 768p? The answer was yes, and how. But the real impetus--as if amazing picture quality weren't enough--was the new ability of the new formats to deliver next-generation surround codecs, both lossless and lossy. I'm talking about you, Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus, and you, DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio. Every future reviewed receiver with HDMI 1.3 capability will get a chance to strut its stuff with the new surround technologies. But what about my reference receiver, which has no HDMI? This is what we in the business call a cliffhanger. See you next week.