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Video Connections
The HD-XA1's back panel (see photo) provides a range of video connections. Most important is the critical HDMI digital video/audio output, which is equipped with HDCP copy protection to keep Hollywood's precious pearls from those nasty pirates. (Aye, matey — give up your bits!). There's also an analog component-video output that sends full resolution 1080i or 720p HDTV signals to your set at the discretion of the studios; as with the pending Blu-ray players, Hollywood will decide whether to flip the Image Constraint Token on its titles to down-res playback via component video. I'm happy to report the ICT was not active on any of the six initial titles we received (The Last Samurai, The Phantom of the Opera, and Million Dollar Baby from Warner and Apollo 13, Doom, and Serentity from Universal).
Beyond these two options are the old fallbacks: composite video (the traditional yellow RCA jack) and its slightly more capable brother, S-video. Neither can pass an HDTV signal of any kind, nor even progressive-scan standard-def (480p) from a traditional DVD. I understand that they have to be there, but it's hard to imagine why anyone buying this player would ever use them.
Of the two HD-compatible connections, HDMI is the obvious first choice — both to keep the disc's pristine digital video signal in that form right through to the TV and to avoid potential complications with the Image Constraint Token on future titles. That said, many enthusiasts most likely to be the first customers for HD DVD were also early HDTV adopters, whose sets may lack the HDMI (or HDCP-compliant DVI) digital video connection that would allow them to hook up to the Toshiba's HDMI port. In that case, the only option is to use the component-video output and let the ICT fall where it may from disc to disc.
Setting Resolution
On the other hand, if you've got either an HD DVD or Blu-ray player in your future, there's an even better reasons than the ICT to consider upgrading to a new 1080p HDTV with a digital video input. First, our ongoing HDTV tests suggest that in most cases, images viewed through a set's HDMI digital input are at least marginally cleaner and more detailed than those coming into its analog component video input. That was certainly the case when we tried running both HDMI digital video and analog component video from the Toshiba into the reference rear-projection HDTV used for this review.
But beyond this, any HDTV that lacks a digital video input today is almost surely a 720p model, which has fewer pixels with which to display the image than a 1080p model. Since all the movies being released for both HD DVD and Blu-ray are being encoded on the disc at 1080p, displaying them on a 720p bigscreen HDTV or projector calls for a fairly complicated downconversion of the signal. That means throwing away some picture information inherent on the disc and introducing the potential for serious image degradation if the quality of the processing in either the player or your TV isn't up to par.
In fact, my experience with the HD-XA1 bore this out. Because the standard for the next evolution of HDMI (known as version 1.3) is not finished, this Toshiba can't send the 1080p signal on an HD DVD disc directly to any TV. But the player does a great job interlacing the disc's 1080p to 1080i, which most 720p HDTVs can handle pretty well with their own deinterlacing and scaling circuits — albeit with at least a modest sacrifice in image quality.
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On the other hand, we saw a significant loss of picture quality when we set the HD-XA1's default output resolution to 720p. The player's internal conversion circuitry caused an obvious loss of detail that made the picture look very soft and also made the edges of objects and on-screen type noticeably more jagged. This was true whether we viewed the 720p picture on the HP — which has does pretty good upconversion of 720p to 1080p — or on a Samsung HP-S5053 50-inch plasma TV, a 1,366 x 768 panel that has to alter a 720p (1,280 x 720) input only slightly for display.
For this reason, I recommend that anyone buying the HD-XA1 or the HD-A1, its $499 sibling, use the Resolution button on the remote to set the player's default signal format to 1080i — even if the native display format of your HDTV is 720p. Given that most HDTV broadcasts today are in 1080i, TV makers pay close attention these days to the quality of their 1080i to 720p conversion. The odds are good that your HDTV's internal scaling circuits will do a better job at preserving the format's inherent image quality than the Toshiba's. On the other hand, in the event that the HD DVD disc you are watching is based on video content recorded originally at 720p — such as some sports events might be — you want to set the player to put out a 720p signal, which will ensure as little processing as possible before it reaches your HDTV.
Audio Connections
For getting sound from the HD-XA1, besides HDMI there's a 5.1-channel analog output fed by an internal decoder, as well as traditional SPDIF optical and coaxial digital jacks. What you'll use will depend in part on the capabilities of your surround sound receiver or processor. But before getting into each of these options, it's helpful to review how audio starts out on the HD DVD discs and what happens inside the player.
In addition to the traditional Dolby Digital and DTS multichannel sound formats, movie studios have several new options for putting even better sound on HD DVD and Blu-ray titles. Among these are Dolby Digital Plus, an enhanced version of Dolby Digital that supports up to 7.1 channels on HD DVD and Blu-ray while boasting both greater coding efficiency and the option to run at much higher data, or bit, rates with less digital compression of the original signal, which may sometimes yield improved sound quality. Even better are the Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD formats, which used lossless coding to provide bit-accurate reproduction of the original digital audio master soundtrack. These also offer up to 7.1-channel sound.
Although the Toshiba HD-XA1, as the first of its ilk, has some limitations, it usually takes whatever surround sound format is on the disc and decodes it internally, converting it to a standard uncompressed pulse-code modulated (PCM) digital audio signal. This multichannel PCM, which provides the highest sound quality that the soundtrack's audio encoding will allow, is then mixed with other audio as needed — a dubbed dialogue track, director's commentary, button sound effects, whatever. Eventually, the mixed PCM exits the player and makes its way to your surround-sound system.
Though it depends on the quality and capability of your surround processor, in most current systems the way to get the best possible sound from the HD-XA1 is to take the decoded-to-PCM audio right out of the player through its HDMI digital video/audio connector. To do so, however, you need to plug it into an HDMI-equipped A/V receiver or processor that can accept mulitchannel PCM via that connection. Not all do, and even receiver manufacturers aren't always aware today which of their models have this feature. In their defense, no one has ever really had a reason to ask them before now. In our case, we fed the player's HDMI signal to a Yamaha RX-V2600 receiver, which automatically detected the mulitchannel PCM and routed it to the speakers.
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The last option for extracting surround sound audio from the HD-XA1 is via the traditional coaxial or optical digital audio outputs — otherwise known as the SPDIF outputs. Here's where things get a little odd. To go from its internal PCM mix to SPDIF, which doesn't have enough bandwidth to carry multichannel PCM, a player must actually re-encode the audio to a Dolby Digital or DTS bitstream. But the HD DVD specfications allow the manufacturer to downconvert to either of the two formats or to give the user the option to select one or the other as a default.
For the HD-XA1 (and HD-A1), Toshiba elected to re-encode to DTS only. This means that if you play an HD DVD that has a Dolby Digital Plus soundtrack and listen to it via the player's coax or optical output, your A/V receiver will actually be getting a DTS bitstream from the player, and its front panel will indicate, accurately, that it is playing back DTS.
Once you understand what's happening you'll adjust to it, but it's a little surreal the first time a Dolby soundtrack flashes up on your receiver as DTS. And if you have any insight into the passionate rivalry between these two companies, you'll really appreciate the irony. But this happens only with HD DVDs — pop a regular DVD into the HD-XA1, and it will pass through the standard Dolby Digital or DTS bitstream on the disc, just like any other DVD player.
In any event, it's worth noting that, because the audio signal on the disc starts out at a higher bit rate, the DTS or Dolby Digital bitstream put out by an HD DVD player is said to have the potential to sound better than the equivalent from a standard DVD player — presumably because the encoders in the HD DVD players are themselves operating at higher data rates than those used for DVD. (Dolby says the Dolby Digital output from an HD DVD player will be 640 kilobits/second, for example, as opposed to the 448 or 384 kbps available from standard DVDs.) I do know that, in our system, listening to the Yamaha receiver on Revel Concerta speakers, I much preferred the HD DVD's DTS downmix to the standard Dolby Digital soundtracks on the standard DVD versions of the movies I watched. But I can't say how much of the HD DVDs' fuller, less edgy sound was attributable to the encoding as opposed to differences in the mix.
Also, about those limitations I mentioned above: Because of the HD-XA1's early release, or perhaps Toshiba's decision to opt for DTS re-encoding rather than Dolby Digital, the HD-XA1 will not pass a multichannel Dolby TrueHD signal or decode such a signal through its internal processor for output via its multichannel analog output. It will decode or pass two channels of TrueHD, but no more. The manual says the HD-XA1 will decode or pass multichannel DTS-HD, though only up to 5.1 channels. Unfortunately, I was not able to test this function since none of the initial discs carried such a soundtrack; all used Dolby Digital Plus for multichannel sound.
RELATED ARTICLES:
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Main Toshiba HD-XA1 Review
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