[Magyar]

On many Blu ray titles, as everyone knows, there are these "Uncompressed PCM" soundtracks to choose from; I was told and informed that these were excellent to listen to in comparison to other lossy legacy codecs. However, when watching titles like Spider Man 3 or Pirates of the Caribbenan, choosing the Uncompressed 5.1 option makes my receiver read "MULTICH" on the display and illuminates the small "HDMI/PCM/MULTICHANNEL" logos above it, making we wonder if the system is operating correctly....am I hearing the uncompressed audio if the receiver is displaying this information? And that leads to another issue. Why don't these uncompressed tracks sound that great to me? I seem to lose LFE level when playing these tracks (I have actually heard that using the multichannel mode of these receivers drops bass by 10dB or so...is this true?) and there seems to be a loss of directionality; like the audio is coming through in surround, yes, with directional information in the surrounds when they're supposed to be...but the overall impact doesnt feel like regular Dolby/DTS surround....like something is missing....is this normal?

"multichannel" is what you should see. It is not true that LFE drops by 10db on the Onkyos, however on higher and models there is a setting for it which should be set for "0 Db". Check that setting.

Now, here is the next issue: when playing tracks that need to be "downmixed," I dont really understand what is going on or what the best way to play them would be....let me explain. This Panasonic deck does not support "DTS Master Audio," and according to the manual, standard DTS will be used as an alternative here....so, with the few Fox titles I have on Blu ray, like "Live Free or Die Hard" and the "Fantastic 4" discs, the Master Audio tracks seem to behave weird in my system....if I keep the "DTS-HD" audio setting in the player on BITSTREAM when playing these tracks, the receiver and player do the HDMI handshake and then the receiver reads "DTS" on the display while the audio display on the Blu ray player's onscreen information grid reads "DTS HD MULTI"....this suggests to me that the player is extracting the "core" DTS mix from the Master Audio track and sending that to the receiver....if I leave the "DTS-HD" setting in the player on PCM and then play these Master Audio tracks, then the receiver displays the exact same thing it does when playing the Uncompressed PCM tracks -- it reads "MULTICH" in the middle of the display and then "HDMI/PCM/MULTICHANNEL" in small logos above it....what is going on here? The manual suggests that by keeping PCM set for these high resolution audio codecs, the machine is decoding the soundtrack and sending a 2-channel signal to the receiver -- but is that what is really happening? What am I hearing when sending these "Master Audio" tracks from the discs in PCM form as opposed to BITSTREAM? Which is the "better" way to listen to them? To be honest, leaving the setting on BITSTREAM and watching "Live Free or Die Hard" last night, the "Master Audio" track sounded punchier, heavier and better with this "extracted core DTS" mix, or whatever was going on, than by running the mix with the PCM setting from the player and letting the receiver see a "Multichannel" signal....something just seemed to be missing doing it that way....but what the is actually going on here? There was DEFINITELY much more bass and punch by leaving the player on BITSTREAM in the "DTS-HD" audio setting. But is this right?

Yes leave it in "bitsream mode" If you're leave it in PCM the player will downmix it to 2ch PCM and discard the LFE all together, hence why you loose bass. The receiver shows "Multichanel" because that was the "last valid" format used when it sense PCM signal, not because it receives an actual multi chanel signal. In the "listening mode" set up in the receiver you can set a default for any signal for any input. Once again check the manual for that.

Now, if the player is set to MULTI CHANNEL, is this somehow affecting bass management and time delays, etc. at my receiver when playing these high resolution audio codecs in PCM? It seems, as I said, I am losing LFE levels when playing these tracks in PCM and the receiver reads "MULTICH" on the display; is something being affected here, because when setting the player to Multi Channel for speaker output, there is a separate menu there for adjusting the speaker levels, sizes, distance delays, etc....but this was already done in my receiver -- but is anything being affected here when passing the PCM tracks of these sound mixes to the receiver via multichannel PCM with the player set to "MULTI CHANNEL"? I mean, are the sounds from the player's speaker setup (even though I have everything set to ZERO on these) affecting the audio with this setup? I want the receiver to handle all bass management and calibrations. Can someone lend some insight here?

Those setting only affecting the analog output as the manual states correctly. The HDMI output shouldn't be affected. However because of some content must be decoded by the player, it is more likely that audio travels through the player's DSP chip even when you use HDMI. So therefore I would set it to multichannel, and set levels and distance to " 0 " all speakers to large, and subwoofer to "on".