Blu-Ray and HD-DVD to Dolby Digital? I am using HDMI connections and still can't figure out this PCM thing especially with the newer Hi-Def movies. I have a Sony BDP-S350 Blu-Ray and Toshiba HD-XA2 HD-DVD players. Thanks!
PCM is uncompressed audio. It's what's sent out of the player after the HD audio (TrueHD) has been decoded. It's a lossless format, so it's better than lossy Dolby Digital. In other words, you *want* PCM, not DD.
If you don't want your BD player to decode the audio you're going to have to tell it to bitstream the audio out. I don't know how to accomplish this though.
Your receiver does not internally decode HD Audio (Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio). Those two formats are lossless audio found on many Blu Ray movies. PCM is the best that you will get. PCM in layman's terms is lossless audio converted by the player. Bitstreaming is where the player sends the information for the audio to the receiver and the receiver decodes it onboard. Hope this helps! Good luck.
For the S350, go to set up menu when there is no disc in it. Scroll down to Audio settings, push the button in the center that has the plus sign on it, you will see audio output priority, set it to HDMI. If you haven't already done that. If you have any other digital cables (optical) connected between the S350 & the Sony receiver, take it off. Now you should get Dolby TruHD & DTS-HD. I don't know about the Toshiba player. I'm not sure how muchI helped, if I helped at all. But it's what I had to do to get HD surround. Sometimes when playing back a Blu-ray disc, it won't default to HD surround. You have to go to the options menu & tell it that you want HD surround.
You need to make sure your source components are sending bitstream audio and not PCM. There are settings in the Setup menus for this. I have an XA2 also (sigh), and the info is on page 55 of the user manual: set to AUTO instead of PCM. Can't help you with the S350, but I'm sure there's something similar.