I had a question on the mechanism of downmixing in the WDTV Live. A lot of my movies have AAC 5.1 384 kbps soundtracks that are downmixed to stereo by WDTV before passing along the stream to my AVR connected via HDMI. What will bd the bitrate of the downmixed 2 channel stream compared to the original 384 kbps 6 channel? The reason I am asking this question is that most movies on my NAS have 2 audio channels typically channel 1 being AAc 5.1 384 kbps and channel 2 AAC 2 channel 128/192 kbps. I distinctly feel the faux surround of dolby prologic or dts neo 6 in the avr is better with the 2 channel 124 kbps source than the downmixed 5.1 384 kbps source. Any reason for this?
This is understandable if the 2 channel source has distinctly higher bitrate of say stereo 224 kbps (224/2=112 kbps)compared to the 6 channel stream’s 384/6 - 64 kbps. But, the matrix processing (false 5.1) of the AVR is consistently better with even a 2 channel 128kbps source. Is there significant quality loss when the downmixing to 2 channel is done by WD TV?
Thanks
Harsha
