CD Review and BAL: Mahler’s Symphony no. 8 on 26th November

[DaveF]

And then the receiver could output high-rez digital to my DAC? (At the expense of having two new boxes!)

I dont think it will work that way. Most likely the receiver will downmix it to PCM 16/44 for outputing over SPDIF to your dCS DAC. SPDIF doesnt have the bandwidth for high rez transmission.

[Ciaran]

The Squeezebox Touch can manage 96/24 over an SPDIF connection.

[DaveF]

The Squeezebox Touch can manage 96/24 over an SPDIF connection.

ah ok, I was talking about the full soundtrack from a Blu-Ray.

[Ciaran]

... and I'm just wondering if there's a way to get the Blu-Ray digital sound to my DAC at full strength!

[DaveF]

... and I'm just wondering if there's a way to get the Blu-Ray digital sound to my DAC at full strength!

As far as I know, the movie studios are one of the main reasons why HDMI is used to transmit HD tracks from Blu-Ray digitally to another device. They are concerned about copyright protection so you have an encrytion/decrytion process occuring over HDMI as well as the actual audio/video data transfer.

In your case the dCS DAC does not have HDMI so to my knowledge there is no way of getting the Blu-Ray sound into your DAC digitally.