ddl's popularity

[no2censorship]

Why is super lossy 16/48 ddl preferrable to 24/96 (or just 16/44.1) WMA Lossless 2 channel?

The compression ratio isn't a huge difference.

 

[450]

I'm guessing it is because people like 5.1 over 2.0? By DDL you mean Dolby Digital right?

 

[no2censorship]

Yes, but why sacrifice clarity and dynamic range for more speakers?

If you're going to get 5 channels of 128 kbps lossily compressed sound fx ~5.5:1 (with 16/44.1 quality) then what good are the positional audio fx? They're low quality. BGM doesn't benefit from more channels, and that's 1/2 the audio.

Is more channels a nearly unanimous preference among gamers?

I know that lossless doesn't always make a huge difference, as some sounds lossily compress very well to the point where one can't tell in a double blind test (but certainly not all sounds/music/voice), but I still prefer lossless 2 channel over ddl.

 

[pharoah]

for music i prefer 2 channel by far if its a good sound system,and not crap.for games,and dvd viewing where its actually coded for multichannel.it can sound alot better,but stil yet depends on the quality of the sound system in question.