HD Audio - Can you tell the difference?

xen0phon

If you read anything written by an audio magazine they will tell you, yes and it sounds magnificent so you should buy Product x for a trillion euro and don't forget these magic cables made from unicorn hair and pixie dust that will give you the extra fidelity you are craving.

Instead, I'd really like to hear about someone's real life experience with HD audio codecs and whether they truly noticed a difference between these and standard 5.1 audio?

Now comes the reason for the question, I'm looking at the Yamaha YSP-2200 (yes it's a soundbar*) which can decode HD audio, but I'm not sure that I'd really be able to tell the difference between that and let'sd say the Philips HTL 9100 which has detachable speakers and therefore can do a sort of 4.1, but only supports standard Dolby Digital and DTS codecs. These two soundbars are bloody expensive too so I want be to semi-sure that they are the right way to go over something that may be half the price e.g a JBL SB400 (All of these have 5 star What Hi-Fi reviews so it's not easy to pick).

So, as I was rambling here are the questions :

HD Audio - Will it make a difference to a soundbar?
HD Audio - Does it ever make a difference, in any system? (I am really interested to know if it's just hyperbole or if there is a noticeable change)
Soundbar - Anyone have any experience of the bars mentioned above and were they good/bad?

*Soundbar - I really don't want 5.1, I curently have a soundbar and love it so I won't be going back to 5.1 ever again, or at least until they perfect a 5.1 wireless speaker system!

Appreciate any comments you may have.

Cheers.

Sam Mac

Its a definitely crisper and cleaner sound. Especially from Blu-rays.

I own a 5.1 Onkyo Set-up with receiver.

xen0phon

Cheers for the reply, since I wrote this I popped into HiFi-hut to demo a few things and have decided to get the Q acoustics 2010's with a centre. I guess there's no substitute for actually hearing speakers in action!