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In Reply to: DTS or Dolby Digital posted by mark_anderson_us@yahoo.com on August 08, 2001 at 02:08:53:
DTS is the better format, and here's why.Dolby digital is a compressed format. The front and center channels are full range, but the surround (and very important) channel are bandwidth limited, somewhere in the order of 50-15k Hz or so. DTS's channels are ALL full range, and the encoding scheme is of somewhat higher resolution. If you have the ability to play DTS, DO IT! You'll be amazed at the difference. The only drawback to DTS is that many discs are not encoded in that format, and since DTS is an uncompressed full range track, it takes up a huge amount of space on the DVD. Many early DTS DVD's did not include any special features, or even Dolby Digital for this reason. Cheers!
Follow Ups:
The back channels are mono and bandwidth limited in Dolby Surround (Pro-logic); not Dolby Digital.-- Greg
as there are some incorrect statements in your reply. For instance, Dolby Digital is full range on all channels, except the LFE or .1 channel. It is common for the LFE to be cut off between 100Hz and 120Hz. The same goes for DTS, except 80Hz in the LFE channel. As for the surrounds in DTS, they get frequencies from 80Hz on up -- frequencies below 80Hz are redirected to the sub. As far as what happens in the mix to the higher frequencies, you may want to go to www.dtsonline.com and find the section that includes the DTS vs Dolby Labs letters (Dolby's paper, DTS's response to Dolby, etc.). WidescreenReview magazine also ran these letters in the mag and online (.com). DTS is not uncompressed: it is compressed. It is, however, much less compressed than Dolby Digital (usually between 10 and 12:1). The DTS compression is between 3 and 6:1. As for the space issue and special features, many of those early discs could have included the extras. The question was, "how will DTS be accepted by the consumer?" or, the polite "decoded" version -- "will we make enough money off of this to feed our greedy asses?". The DVD spec says that either PCM or Dolby Digital must be included on a DVD-V. However, Dolby Digital doesn't just mean 5.1 sound. It could be just 2 channels of audio with Dolby Digital encoding. The early DTS DVDs from Universal had this form of Dolby Digital, which I believe are at a bitrate if 192kb/s. DTS on these discs were at 1.54Mb/s, though now DTS is commonly encoded at 754kb/s. Dolby Digital for 5.1 is either at 448kb/s or 384kb/s, depending on the studio. For comparison, two channel music on a CD is at 1.4Mb/s. By the way, DTS can go up to over 4Mb/s and include eight channels of audio.
Joe,You've got some inaccuracies that really should be corrected too.
1) LFE channel is ~20 - 120Hz for both DTS and DD.
2) DTS surrounds can be full range, or managed by the processor, just as DD is. Crossover frequency if the speaker is being managed, is implementation dependent, and could be any number of frequencies, with the most common being 80Hz, as this is the THX spec for a small spaker to crossover.
Possibly more, didn't completely scour your reply.
Regards,
I was thinking of the movie theater version of DTS, not the home theater version. Sorry about the mix-up. But please do "scour".
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