Video Asylum

Posted by David Aiken (A) on August 19, 2008 at 19:15:08

In Reply to: RE: Ok, but... posted by Allen Wright on August 19, 2008 at 04:17:51

It's worse.

Dolby Digital is a means of packing 5.1 channels of lossy compressed sound into a single signal. First the player has to decode it to PCM and then it gets converted to analog via a DAC. How lossy depends on the options your recorder offers and the decisions you make but it is lossy, and it sounds noticeably inferior to the new Dolby True HD format on Blu-ray discs since True HD is lossless.

Dolby never offered 24/96 to my knowledge but their competitor DTS did and I have one DVD with a 24/96 soundtrack. It sounds quite good but it's still a lossy compression algorithm.

For lossless compression you need to think in terms of the Dolby and DTS high definition audio formats for Blu-ray. On the lossy formats I think DTS sounds better than Dolby and that's probably because DTS uses less data compression than Dolby, meaning less gets thrown away.

Someone else can probably provide the specs for the bits/sampling rate for Dolby Digital but the bottom line is that it is lossy compression and it doesn't sound as good as CD to my ears.



David Aiken