You asked: Blu-ray sales, Samsung and Dolby Vision

We’re starting with a question that John Siracusa has been sending in off and on for about a year now. John updated his A/V setup for 2022 and was disappointed to learn that many of the major electronics brands were ditching Blu-ray players. It was between Oppo and Magnetar, or super-premium products from Panasonic and Sony. There were no truly budget-friendly players left. He was also even more disappointed to learn that the supposedly “current” Blu-ray players he bought, including the Panasonic UB820K, were actually several years old and running software that felt like it was from the 1990s, making the players look even older, despite being priced at a very modern, premium price. The question became whether we could expect anything better in the near future.

The short answer to your question is that I don’t think we could have expected anything better, and I don’t think we’re going to blame Sony or Panasonic. But let’s start by acknowledging that 4K Blu-rays offer the best possible picture and sound quality. That’s undeniable. In fact, I’d say most people can tell the difference between a 4K Blu-ray and the same content on a streaming service, even if they watch the two side by side. But the issue isn’t whether 4K Blu-ray is superior on its face. The issue is that too few people care enough to really fuel the Blu-ray player market.

We live in a good enough society. High-quality streaming, with its 4K resolution, HDR, and improved bitrates and bit depths, looks pretty good to most people. But putting quality aside for a moment, streaming is much more usable.

If we look at disc sales, they’re still in active decline. Especially DVD. You’d be shocked at how long DVD has been around. And if disc sales are going down, disc player sales are going down.

The software part – the part you interact with? That’s powered by a chip that’s not powerful at all. Those chips can’t run a modernized user interface, even if someone wanted to. Manufacturers have to move to a more powerful chipset that has to work with the player. And then they have to order a big enough amount of those new parts so they don’t cost an arm and a leg. And then they have to sell a bunch of premium players that will collect dust because of falling player sales.

Being passionate is hard. I feel it every day.

Praveen from India writes that he wants to connect his turntable to a Sony Bravia Theater Quad, and points out that the difficulty is that the Theater Quad only accepts HDMI.

So Praveen will need one box to do this. But if anyone else is thinking of doing the same, you may need two boxes. Praveen has an Audio Technica LP60X, which has a built-in phono preamp – but if your turntable doesn’t have one, you’ll need one.

Then you need an analog-to-digital converter box that takes the analog audio, digitizes it, and outputs it over HDMI. You find that you need an analog-to-digital converter that takes an analog audio or video signal and converts it to digital for HDMI output—there are many boxes that do the opposite.

I would spend a few dollars on a good ADC, because that has everything to do with the quality of the conversion you get. And since the Theater Quad only has one HDMI input, I would suggest sending the turntable signal from that box via HDMI to one of your TV’s inputs, and then having the TV’s ARC or eARC connection send the audio to the Quad. Or you’ll need another box in the form of an HDMI switcher, so you can switch between the TV audio and your turntable audio.

Zoraver wants to know if the Samsung Q990D’s HDMI ports support Dolby Vision on non-Samsung TVs.

So, support? No. What about transmitting? Yes, they do. There’s no special hardware needed to transmit a signal in a soundbar. It can be as simple as receiving a signal, tapping it to use it, and then transmitting the same signal. What Samsung won’t “support” is processing that Dolby Vision signal once it reaches its destination. In the case of Dolby Vision, that’s a TV, and Samsung TVs don’t support Dolby Vision processing. So the Q990D will transmit a signal with Dolby Vision — but that’s all it does. It just passes it on to the next thing to deal with.