Those with Xbox 360 HD DVD players who bought the recently released Nine Inch Nails: Beside You In Time concert disc were let down with the poor performance of the audio caused by a bug in Microsoft"s decoding software. The NIN disc features a Dolby TrueHD lossless audio track, which promises excellent aural quality for those with the appropriate surround setup but the HD DVD add-on is incapable of outputting a TrueHD signal and instead it downsamples the lossless stream into a lossy 640kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. To make matters worse, playing the disc on with TrueHD results in "static popping" and "clipping" noises.
A Microsoft employee confirmed that the Xbox 360 HD DVD team was aware of the bug and will be addressing it in an upcoming software update. Based on what he had heard from the Xbox team he stated: "We plan on shipping an update to the Xbox 360 HD DVD player in early to mid spring. In this update we will be adding DTS output, improved Audio, and improved title compatibility. The variability there is that this is a software project and we are fixing/enhancing a lot of things and we want to make sure we get them right. So it is difficult to give an exact day for the update."