ive got a client with AVR-4806 receiver and wants to add Blu-ray player. if i hook it up hdmi i believe the denon will say multi ch in. obviously this would be pcm format. (im going from memory, its been a while since i have worked with a non-DDTHD receiver) is this the same high res multi ch that i would get from the analog 7.1 outputs of player? now that i am typing it out i think i answered my own question. the only way to get DDTHD would be to have the player decode and output analog. any input?

If the Denon supports Linear PCM (and it likely does), then all you need to do is make sure the BD player has built-in decoders for TruHD and DTS-HD Master. Not all do. If the player has the decoders, then it would be true lossless audio, identical to if the receiver did the decoding.

One thing to watch out for: check the manual of the player, as some players will NOT actually provide lossless internally decoded audio if the disc does audio mixing (ie. for menu sounds), or even if there is the POSSIBILITY of a BD Live picture-in-picture feature. Instead they use the core lossy track. I know on the Sony I have, there's a settings menu that essentially disables those features and ensures lossless at all times.

so most players with built in decoders will output the uncompressed high res multi channel audio over hdmi. do the speaker and sound adjustments in the BD players menu work for the digital LPCM outputs or analog only.

I think that depends on the player, but I wouldn't bank on it.

The PS3 does internal decoding too - before the Slim, that was the *only* way to get lossless audio out.

If your receiver does not support HD formats, it will process it as the core lossy codec, the only way to get HD into your non-HD receiver would be analog outputs from the BluRay player, assuming that the player decodes HD codes to the output. Not many do...

In either case, if the device does not decode HD codecs, it will fall back to the core lossy codec.