I am wondering if it's worth the money to upgrade my receiver so that I can take advantage of the new audio codecs on the blu-ray format (TrueHD, DTS-Master Audio and Uncompressed PCM).
I currently own a Yamaha RX-V430 and have Paradigm Studio 20s as my fronts with it. It's not a big room (about 15 feet by 11 feet) so I don't need a lot of power, so my current receiver gives me enough power for the volume levels I need.
I was looking at the Onkyo 606 and Yamaha RX-V663. The Onkyo sounds great, but I've read about overheating and "humming" issues with it, so I started looking more closely at the Yamaha 663.
Is there that much difference between the old compressed formats and the new lossy and uncompressed formats? I've read varrying points of view. Would this upgrade be worth it to be able to hear the new audio formats?
Honestly, you probably won't hear much difference with that small of a room. You might tell more of a difference in a dedicated media room with treated walls, and properly positioned 7.1 speakers using dipoles for surround, and so forth, where everything is set up to take full advantage of the upgrade. Otherwise I'd look more at HDMI upconversion to 1080P for video sources as the main reason to upgrade and not just uncompressed audio for discrete 7.1
To me there is quite a noticeable difference between the older surround formats and the new HD audio formats. Even my wife notices, and she's not listening for it like I am.
I find having half decent rear surround speakers makes a difference, since that's where the improvements with the new HD codecs seems most noticeable. Surround effects are quite stunning, actually.
Is there much improvement in the clarity of dialogue? I find with my current set-up I'm constantly having to turn up the volume of my centre speaker to be able to hear low dialogue levels clearly.
I find it depends on the particular movie. Some movies seem to have the dialogue mixed too low, so I'm constantly turning the volume up and down. It's annoying, actually.
I did find a huge improvement with dialogue when I moved to a matching center channel though.
also, dolby digital supports a dialog enhancement feature that boosts dialog clarity on the center channel for DD encoded movies. check your receiver manual for how to turn that feature up a few clicks