Still Having Problems with TrueHD

[SomeJoe]

PS3 can't bitsream TrueHD so it's decoding internally. I've had this discussion with a friend at work before, what is the obsession with wanting to see the TrueHD LED light up on your amp? It makes no difference if the audio is decompressed by the player or the amp, the decompressed content is exactly the same. So if it works with the player doing the decoding....let the player do the decoding - hooray, problem solved.

That is very true, provided that your decoding device doesn't then do something to the PCM audio after it's decoded that you don't want.

There are many devices out there that will decode TrueHD (or DTS-MA) internally to PCM, then apply volume changes, sound mixing, DRC, Dialnorm, equalization, or other things to the audio, and many times you can't fully control that. This is one reason why I prefer to bitstream, even though my hardware player can decode internally. My AVR is a dedicated audio processing device, and can be set to apply or not apply all of those things to the audio, giving me full control. Since the other devices like BD set-top players are first and foremost designed as playback devices and not audio processing devices, their exposed user controls for the audio are limited.

[SomeJoe]

My apologies for the very late update on this. Been very busy at work. :)

I have indeed finally solved this problem. It is indeed eac3to.exe's issue, and the root of the problem is the removal of dialogue normalization.

Eac3to removes dialogue normalization by default. When it does that, the sound is distorted when played through my Pioneer receiver.

Adding "-keepdialnorm" on the eac3to.exe command line has completely fixed the problem. I've tried my particularly problematic TrueHD track (Iron Man) which was very obviously distorted when played back after a demux with eac3to.exe and a remux with TSMuxer. The TrueHD track now plays perfectly and identically to the original when the -keepdialnorm option is used during the eac3to.exe demux.

This must be something particular to Pioneer receivers, evidently they pay very close attention to the dialogue normalization metadata and get confused if the values are incorrect, missing, etc.