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Comment by bleepblop | Hacker News Reader

If your receiver doesn't support eARC, you are definitely not getting full resolution audio.

I don't use ARC at all (all audio sources go through the receiver), so that's a non-issue for me.

That's fine. Let me rephrase: if you're not using the latest and greatest HDMI protocol you're not getting full fidelity audio.

Besides the DTS passthrough (which works just fine), it supports 48kHz PCM from my media-center, so I don't know what more is needed.

Again, that is fine. Besides getting an uncompressed 2 channel signal; anything above 2 channels is going to be compressed and frequencies carved out of the additional channels due to the encoding process. Thus a loss of fidelity. You "may" get a multi channel signal, but it is not 1:1. There are plenty of papers written about the subject since it's nearly a 50 year old technology.

My laptop definitely supports up to 8 channels (7.1) of uncompressed PCM over HDMI. I've tested my receiver up to 5.1 (I don't have an 8-speaker setup) and it works.

[edit]

I have an Intel IGP; Intel has supported this since the G45 (Core 2 Duo era), AMD added it in the HD 4800 era, and nVidia in the GeForce 8300 era. Support for this is over a decade old at this point.

The "stereo only uncompressed" is a S/PDIF legacy, and while HDMI does support S/PDIF, it was already "the bad old way" when Bluray players came out (though it took a few years for discrete GPU makers to catch up).

Might I suggest reading up on how both DTS and Dolby encode audio then.

DTS and Dolby are unrelated to uncompressed LPCM. HDMI 1.0 supports up to 8-channels, up to 192kHz, and up to 24-bits of depth. In practice, my laptop to my receiver can definitely do 24-bit 48kHz PCM at 8 channels, and that's certainly "full fidelity" for most setups.

If you're sending audio and audio only then sure. Wouldn't be my solution from my professional opinion though.

Uncompressed multichannel LPCM works along-side video just fine. The only thing you have said in this thread that is true has been about eARC/ARC, yet you've doubled-down on your statements even when I made it clear that I'm not using ARC.

My mistake was speaking with an audio consumer and not an engineer.

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