Sony Leaves Out Major Detail in PS3 Slim Announcement
Home Theater News Blu-ray Hardware News Written by AVRev.com Monday, 24 August 2009
Sony recently announced the upcoming release of the PS3 Slim and the discontinuation of the current PS3 models. While the company detailed everything from the chips to the orientation of the hardware, they neglected one major fact for home theater consumers. The PS3 Slim will have the ability to pass Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio in their native bitstream encoding to A/V receivers.
Currently, the PS3 can only internally decode the DTS-HD bitstream audio, making the need for a receiver with the ability to do so pointless. The passing of bitstream audio versus PCM audio remains a debate. However, with many receivers performing internal conversions for both video and audio, it seems that you would want one less component making conversions in your system. Allowing the player to do the conversion separates the audio and video from the start, only to be amplified by the conversion processes performed by the receiver and TV.
There is no word on whether the firmware update will add this feature to current PS3 owners, but from what I recall, current PS3 systems do not contain the proper chip for handling the bitstream of DTS-HD.