80 Gig Hard drive . . .

the Pana BD-50 is the best player at the respective price range. From the link I've attached before at CNET, its the only player in its class to pass the 5 HQV tests, something even the PS3 could not.

However, the BD-35 and 55 I believe are available for preorder. The latter is $399 I think.

If you don't need the gaming machine, media center, and are looking for a standalone, I heartily recommend Pana.

They own most of the patents associated with bluray, and are very good with up to date FW support.

does it have a coax or optical audio output? I believe that's where you get the audio from a hdmi connection.

strips your surround sound.

and you can forget about lossless audio with that as well.

As much as I love the PS3, the audio dilemma that you discovered has pissed me off too. I have posted many times on the Sony Playstation website and voiced my feelings. I also wrote the Sony helpline many times. Sony responded but it didn't help. I have no idea what the heck they were thinking because I think this is a huge short-sighted mistake. I hope this can be resolved with a firmware upgrade but I'm not holding my breath.

Is this with all sources or is it just PS3?

as far as I know. nothing to do with ps3. there's prolly a tv or two out there that can, but i sure dont know what they are.

if thats how you have it hooked up, you most likely are missing out on all discrete effects, lfe, etc. if you hear something from the surrounds, that most likely means you are simply matrixing a 2.0 source for all speakers, with bass mgmt sending low freq to sub. Again, I doubt you would be getting LFE, but only low end of speaker information.

I thought it was my el cheapo Sony receiver. Lived and learn!

Why do you need both HDMI and digital optical audio output? I assume you are running your HDMI to your HDTV and want to then run a digital optical output to your receiver for sound?

Why not run the HDMI to your TV and then use the optical audio output on your HDTV to run to your receiver? I have that set-up for my HD-DVR cablebox and it works fine.

what tv do you use? are you sure it doesnt strip discrete audio?

every samsung and panasonic that I have ever run into does so far.

My Sony SXRD passes discrete 5.1 sound onto my receiver when I feed it a signal from my HD-DVR via HDMI. I guess I just assumed that all major brand name HDTVs did the same...

My Sony 55" SXRD (1080P) does indeed have an optical audio out. But this would involve buying an optical cable about ten feet long.

And in reality I was not that impressed with the HD picture. Yes, there is an improvement. But my Samsung upconverting DVD player does an excellent job of upconverting (to 1080P) DVDs. Beautiful picture on the TV. The improvement in Blu-ray was just not that dramatic. Not enough to justify the cost of the PS3 and not being able to use the optical audio. Both together shot it down.

I can't stand SD anymore.

How many feet do you sit away?

You had the correct settings too? You weren't outputting 24fps from PS3 were you? (can a Sony SXRD accept that, or would it go blank if it received that?).

I think the video quality isn't THAT much of a step up over a good upconverting DVD player at normal viewing distances. Although, some movies definitely shine in HD (more of the epic action types).

To me, the whole Blu-ray format is good for its audio options with the HD audio codecs. The DVD based ones are hard to go back to after listening to a kick a$$ DTS-MA track on an action Blu-ray movie.

And I don't think 10 ft optical audio cables are that expensive anymore...$5.48 for a 12 ft optical cable at monoprice: http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10229

I have the exact opposite impression.

My predictions before jumping on BD were that the audio would improve most, and the video would be marginal.

After obtaining a good display, nice collection, the video improvements are overwhelmingly more impressive than the audio ones, IMO.

Ive been saying recently that displays were ahead of all the source material available until BD showed up. Now I think most display are BEHIND the source material.

The thing is SXRD rptv is pretty decent... that's why I am confused...

I still wonder what kind of viewing angles you guys have.

I think I am taking the source material into consideration too. I've watched Rambo and Transformers on Blu-ray so far and they are a big step up from their SD versions visually. I was more impressed with the sound upgrades though, everything just felt tighter. Although, the HD on the Blu-rays totally blows away the HD on my Comcast HD-DVR (no surprise).

But then I watched "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead" on Blu-ray and it was an indie film so the video quality looked just slightly better than a DVD. It just depends on how much effort went into the production of the disc I guess.

Don't get me wrong, I am impressed with the video quality of the better made Blu-ray movies, but some of them aren't that impressive compared to their DVD counterparts.