Blu Ray player’s HDMI-out “sound quality”? What “What Hi Fi” is talking about?

[Vovgan]

New review of the Sony UBP-X800M2 blu Ray player is up on What HiFi’s website. Among other things they praise this player for its sound quality:

”It’s wonderfully musical by the standards of this price. ... There’s dynamics and detail in spades ... Dialogue is clear, natural and convincing”, etc.

But unlike OPPO UDP-205 this Sony has no analogue outputs. So what could they possibly mean by the sound quality of HDMI output? That nothing is broken in HDMI output?

https://www.whathifi.com/reviews/sony-ubp-x800m2

Thanks,
Vladimir

 

[SIY]

Two mistakes: reading that website and paying attention to anything written there.

 

[Blumlein 88]

Quite simply they are talking bull shite.

They do claim to upsample (they call it audio upscaling) CD, MP3 and other formats. So I suppose you get highest sample rate output even with CD or MP3. They also apparently are doing this somewhat over bluetooth. But that isn't going to cause what they are describing.

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/articles/00230269
Most of the info on the above linked page is all kinds of wrong.

Ninja'd by SIY by a few seconds.

 

[BillG]

What Hifi is a subjective audiophile website. They never do a performance analysis or double blind listening test. Nice pictures, though...

 

[Vovgan]

Two mistakes: reading that website and paying attention to anything written there.

Reading something is paying attention to it, so I can admit committing only one mistake ;-)

 

[pozz]

@amirm previously wrote this in-depth article, which includes measurements: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...s/a-deep-dive-into-hdmi-audio-performance.56/

 

[Vovgan]

@amirm previously wrote this in-depth article, which includes measurements

Thank you for sharing the link. I looked through the article, it seems to be comparing different DAC implementations processing the same signal received via HDMI (and also S/PDIF) protocol. I have not seen there whether the source of HDMI signal makes any difference at all.

 

[pozz]

Thank you for sharing the link. I looked through the article, it seems to be comparing different DAC implementations processing the same signal received via HDMI (and also S/PDIF) protocol. I have not seen there whether the source of HDMI signal makes any difference at all.

It does in some units, though not very significantly. Check out the AVRs listed in the master review thread.

 

[Willem]

If you use the disc player in a multichannel system, there is no way around using hdmi I think. Conversely, if, like me, you only use it in a 2 channel system, using the optical or coaxial output is preferable, and is indeed what I do.

 

[Theriverlethe]

Sure, I too use coax output of my blu ray player (processed via external DAC) when I watch content with 2 channel audio, but my initial question which prompted the thread remains: is it true that some competent HDMI output implementations in blu ray players can make multi-channel audio sound worse than other competent implementations? I have learned on this web-site that it is true for DACs (there is a spectrum of quality depending on the chip, engineering around it etc), but what about HDMI outputs? Is the only thing that can make HDMI output worse is jitter?

No, no, and... no. It would be hard for even an incompetent HDMI implementation to cause audible problems, if it works at all.