Sony X800 - option to convert DTS > DD?

Hi, kmpowell. Welcome to the community. I'm not familiar with the model of television but hopefully someone else will chime in. Have you contacted SONY and were they able to help in any way? If so, can you let us know? Many thanks.

The Sony UBP-UX800 (aka UX80) is an Ultrra-HD BluRay DVD player with wired Ethernet and wireless Internet connectivity. It has HDMI and coax digital audio output. I'm interested in Sonos connectivity options, also, because a UX80 and a pair of Play:3 speaker units will be the start of my home entertainment system.

Does the UBP-UX800 have the ability to transcode from DTS to Dolby Digital? That's the signal the PLAYBAR and PLAYBASE can accept across the optical input. At this point, Sonos doesn't handle DTS.

I see on the Sony website that it doesn't. Which means you'll need to be changing each disc's audio settings to the Dolby Digital or simple stereo soundtrack, if the disc has one. Otherwise, you won't get any sound out of the PLAYBAR / PLAYBASE.

As far as i'm aware the X800 has no option to convert to DD5.1 on the fly. The only players that do are the Samsungs and they do it brilliantly. Really don't know why other manufacturers don't do it?? The only thing you can try is to change your 'Audio Ouput' on the player to output PCM and see if it outputs a 5.1 bitstream or just stereo.

Sadly X800 does not let you select the bitstream format and provides DTS 5.1 when playing a DTS HD track which simply won't work with PLAYBAR and co. You can still get stereo on the digital output by selecting the PCM option but that's not helpful really.

Moreover I tried to force X800 to give me Dolby Digital 5.1 using an EDID manager/emulator, namely HDFury Doctor HDMI. That's also not working, meaning there is currently no way to get AC-3/DD5.1 from X800 when playing most BD primary audio which is typically DTS.

My TV is a Philips 55PUK7150/12. It can pass a Dolby Digital 5.1 audio signal from an HDMI input through to its optical output. However when receiving DTS it will downmix it into LPCM 2.0. On one hand that downmix is better than nothing cause at least you get audio on the Playbar, on the other hand you loose surround.

For testing purposes I also used a Neotek Optical Switch, thus I could either route the audio through the TV or directly to the Playbar.

Using HDFury DrHDMI I could copy the TV EDID, load it on my PC and view and edit it using AW EDID Editor. Here are the audios my TV is accepting according to its EDID:

• LPCM 2.0: which is uncompressed stereo
• AC-3: which is a compressed bitstream up to Dolby Digital 5.1
• DTS: which is another compressed bitstream up to DTS 5.1

That kind of make sense even though the only format of those three that can possibly result in proper surround sound after passing through the TV is AC-3 since DTS as explained above is downmixed to LPCM 2.0.

Seeing this it legitimates the fact that X800 when using Automatic Digital Audio Output provides DTS bitstream. I edited that EDID to remove DTS from the supported formats and used Doctor HDMI to expose it to X800 instead of the original. Sadly X800 was blind to that and kept providing DTS even though it was not listed as supported anymore.