Digital Trends

Toshiba HD-XA1 July 9th, 2006 | by Rebecca Day

Setup and Use

Setup can take various routes depending on your input array. I connected the component video outputs from the HD-XA1 to the matching inputs on my 1080i TV, which is not equipped with HDMI. Toshiba, to its credit, stuffed an HDMI cable in the accessories bag (along with a composite video and RCA analog audio cables) for people who have HDMI-equipped TVs.

For audio, I connected my own Toslink cable (none in the box) from the DVD player to my receiver, choosing the simple single cable route over sending six analog runs to my receiver.

A 5.1-channel analog connection would have netted me Dolby Digital Plus (when the HDMI 1.3 standard is complete, you'll be able to get not only Dolby Digital Plus, but DVD-Audio along with hi-res video through the single cable). An HDMI connection would have passed through Dolby Digital Plus as well, but my receiver only has optical and coaxial audio inputs, which can't send through the Dolby Digital Plus signals.

For my situation, Toshiba's solution was to take the 5.1 channels of PCM audio from the Dolby Digital Plus soundtrack, re-encode them into DTS inside the player and then shoot the audio out over the optical digital audio output to my receiver. Knox says Toshiba chose this route in the first-generation players because “DTS at a higher bit rate is at least equal to the quality you would have had from the Dolby Digital Plus that's typical on an HD DVD release.”

I didn't feel cheated. Horses pounding across the battlefield in The Last Samurai with arrows zipping by were convincing enough to me, and I think my neighbors would agree. I also got up to shut the windows during a storm scene only to realize that the only storm was on screen, not outside my house.

On the video setup side, you have to tell the player the type of connection you're using along with the native resolution of the display. Toshiba placed V. Output and Resolution buttons on the remote control to facilitate that task rather than sending you into menus.

Since my early adopted CRT is a 1080i model with component video connections, I was relieved to find that none of the HD DVD titles so far have incorporated the dreaded Image Constraint Token option which Hollywood forced into the HD DVD spec. ICT is a copy-protection feature that, if implemented, would downconvert video signals sent over component video outputs to 480p resolution—no better than standard DVD—to prevent copying. HDMI, by contrast, has built-in copy protection features so ICT isn't necessary. ICT encoding would be a stinging slap to early adopters like me who bought into HDTV prior to the availability of HDMI.  

The Toshiba HD-XA1