Slowly, ever so slowly we’re beginning to learn about the internal differences between Sony’s new PS3 Slim and its chubby ancestry. We already knew that it supported BraviaLink while talk of “faster gaming” was introduced (suspiciously) yesterday; something that remains very much in doubt until we can confirm. Now we hear that the fatboy gone slim supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio bitstream output to your receiver. Hear that audio nerds? Bitstream. See the HDMI chip on previous generations of the PS3 didn’t support bitstream output of the new(ish) high def codecs like Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. As such, the PS3 had to decode it internally before sending it over to your receiver via LPCM. A process that could garble the lossless audio depending on your setup. Even though the vast majority of people will never notice the difference (or even care), PS3 Slim owners can still kick back in smug satisfaction each time the TrueHD or DTS-HD MA indicators light-up on their receivers.

Cling to that Cell-based PlayStation 2 emulator patent all you want, but Sony director of hardware marketing John Koller has some disparaging words for those wanting Shadow the Colossus to one day work one the latest hardware. PS2 backwards compatibility “is not coming back, so let me put that on the table,” he told Ars Technica, soon after reaffirming, “that won’t be returning.” Apparently people have been buying the PS3 not for PS2 titles but for the newest games and Blu-ray movies — and given PS2’s continued dominance in sales, presumably to play those last-gen games, we don’t doubt it. Seeing such a feature standard in all other consoles out there, including the first two iterations of this one, we can’t help but feel burned. Still, it was less than two months ago when Sony’s mantra was no PS3 price cuts, and funny enough, that’s more or less what happened. So if Koller wants to go back on his word and offer PS2 compatibility further down the line, hey, we’ll forgive him.