Happy to report that it's the Denon 3600 making quad playback work. There are 4 input channels shown in the info screen and 5 speakers active out of my 5.0.4 setup. So, for whatever reason Denon engineers decided to enhance the quad experience by feeding silence into the center speaker, but still massive kudos to Denon for releasing an update that enables quad playback on the 3600 model, at least for the DTS-HD codec. I cannot see why it would not work for PCM and DSD as well, but I have not had a chance to test this.
Receivers that decode 4.0 PCM/MLP recordings over HDMI
- Thread starter Mark Anderson
- Start date
Help Support QuadraphonicQuad:
Owen Smith
2K Club - QQ Super Nova
I have an online friend (not on QQ) who's AVR plays 4.0 DTS HD MA fine but screws up on 4.0 LPCM over HDMI. I'm not convinced your DTS HD MA was ever broken, it's part of the codec supplied from DTS that it decodes 4.0 like this. Whereas 4.0 LPCM over HDMI each manufacturer has to write software for themselves, introducing the chance of getting it wrong and not thinking to test it. Their brains were stuck on 2.0 and 5.1/7.1.
I guess you may be right. No luck with the Dark Side of the Moon quad from the Immersion box set which is available as LPCM.
I had a strong assumption that I would not be able to play the recent quadio discs until I sort out the mini PC and add a silent centre to ripped files. I believe that this was based on my recollection of being unable to play The Doors Singles (also 4 channel DTS-HD) and the Doobie Brothers quadios. I can't tell 100% if this was indeed the case or my memory is fuzzy, but I would not be surprised if it turned out that Denon added this playback capability via updates over the years.
There was never an issue with the 2021 X8500HA as it has the HDMI 2.1 board which does not have the Quad 4.0 PCM/MLP issue unlike the 2018 X8500H without the HDMI 2.1 "A" board upgrade, it's disappointing that D+M's HDMI 2.0b board omitted support for Quad 4.0 PCM/MLP playback
