DTS MA 7.1 showing only 5.1 on display

Are you certain that particular movie actually had 7.1 channels on the disc? Neither Prologic nor Neo can expand a 7.1 audio track to use the rear-surround speakers. since the audio track already claims to be using them. On the other hand, I've also seen reports that some DTS HD-MA decoders will always expand 5.1 soundtracks to 7.1 if you have rear-surround speakers. Apparently they assume that if you have the speakers, you want to use them no matter what the original sound track was.

Was this a NetFlix rental by any chance? I've seen a report on another forum which reported symptoms consistent with the rental version of the new Star Trek movie having only a 5.1 audio track.

No, these are store bought blurry discs and I checked to make sure that the 7.1 audio track is selected in the disc setup menu, as I said Dolby TruHD 7.1 always works fine. The only thing I need to confirm is that thx processing is not somehow getting messed up with the DTS MA ? I use the same THX mode with TruHD discs and no issues.

What model of disc player are you using? Still the Panasonic?
I'm wondering if there's a player setting that's not right.

What happens if you turn on decoding in the player so that the receiver receives a multichannel LPCM signal? (e.g. turn off bitstream and/or turn on "audio mix".) Does the receiver show 5.1 PCM or 7.1 PCM for discs with a DTS HD-MA soundtrack?

selden said:

What model of disc player are you using? Still the Panasonic?
I'm wondering if there's a player setting that's not right.

What happens if you turn on decoding in the player so that the receiver receives a multichannel LPCM signal? (e.g. turn off bitstream and/or turn on "audio mix".) Does the receiver show 5.1 PCM or 7.1 PCM for discs with a DTS HD-MA soundtrack?

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I will have to play with those settings tomorrow evening when I have time. Yes I am using the Panasonic
BDT220

I would turn off the THX processing mode and just go straight decode or direct. I get it mixed up but turn off all extra processing and see if it still shows 5.1 on the display.

Ok, thanks for all the thoughts. After some trial and error I figured out it was a setting in the audio menu of the BluRay player, it was set to down convert all DTS MA signals to standard DTS 5.1. Not even sure why that would be an option but it defaults to on. After I turned it off everything was good.

Great!

My suspicion is that the setting is intended for when you're using a non-HDMI digital output. In that case, it needs to know if it should downconvert to lossless stereo PCM (which could provide higher resolution) or to lossy DTS (which would provide discrete surround-sound).