Receivers and Decoders
New boxes with modern chips offer 'bitstream through', which can feed amplifiers with DTS decoders. Some boxes can be upgraded to DTS by installing downloaded software. Several manufacturers will introduce DTS-capable boxes later this year (autumn 2003).
All multi-channel amplifiers have a digital input for 5.1 audio. Cheaper ones have an optical input, more expensive ones also have a coax input, and some units are equipped with analogue inputs for 6 audio channels. Recent units are also capable of processing 6.1 DTS streams. SR has used a trick to make our multi-channel audio broadcasts visible to owners of home cinema systems and set-top boxes with hard disks (PVR's). 'Radio' is not a valid concept in these systems. Therefore, in addition to the 1.5 Mbit/s audio stream, a still picture (SR logo plus some instructions) has been coded as a video stream at 256 kbit/s. The user can find this 'TV channel' like any other channel.
