DTS versus Dolby Digital 5.1

G

gotkilled

Limp Gawd
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May 19, 2005
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Which one is better. IMO DTS is better since it's uncompressed and has a higher bitrate compared to dolby which is compressed, i believe, as it is around 384kb. I may be wrong, but I just wanna know what you guys think.
 
I like DTS myself, but honestly, there is absolutely zero difference in real life. though that piano thing is cool
 
Bugalaman said:
I like DTS myself, but honestly, there is absolutely zero difference in real life. though that piano thing is cool
Click to expand...

to the OP I thought the difference in dolby digital and dts was like 800kbps to 500kbps for audio?

and I did notice a big difference between dolby digital and DTS...

I was watching the movie K-pax in DTS, watched the whole movie.. then I watched the alternate ending which was only done in Dolby Digital (finished alternate ending, just never put in the movie)

night and day.. it was impossible not to tell the difference between the two... dts just sounded soo much better and sharper...
 
There's a huge difference. Dolby 5.1 makes little to no use of the rear surrounds and barely touches the LFE channel. DTS on the other hand makes excellent use of all channels.

DTS also is more efficient at using the front channels with proper distribution of sound to all front surround and center channels. Dolby digital 5.1 primarily uses the center channel for just about every sound.
 
Ahh. I see that's good to know. Now I know what I'll choose next time when I pop in a DVD. The sad thing is that DTS isn't always available for every DVD. It seems that Dolby Digital is more popular.

Hrm...this gets me thinking. I wonder what the theaters use....
 
i figure, if an engineer spent the time to encode a soundtrack into DTS and put it on the disc, there must be a reason for it. i would hope he/ she wouldnt go through that work and someone wouldn't pay them to go through that work to come up with a coding scheme inferioir to DD.
 
I notice that DTS tracks sometimes sound better than the DD tracks, but not always. I'm wondering if this improvement is due mostly from better sound mastering rather than compression algorithm.
 
PS! said:
There's a huge difference. Dolby 5.1 makes little to no use of the rear surrounds and barely touches the LFE channel.
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??????

i don't doubt that dts is better than dolby 5.1 (on a revealing system, on a system that has shortcomings of it's own, it would be more difficult to tell the difference, and even on a revealing system, i'd bet that in an abx test, you'd better have relatively golden ears to tell the difference), however, the above statement is just not true...

if indeed the poster is experiencing this in his/her system, then i would suggest that they have a processor problem...
 
OK, lets take the non-factual parts out of this thread

1st. I am a serious hometheater geek so just like most of you I don't like falacies in my computer tech information or my hometheater stuff.

1 DTS is not technologically superior to Dolby Digital ES or standard
2 Dolby Digital (in any incarnation) is not technologically superior to DTS

OK, the reason DTS always "seems" to sound better is 3 fold. 1st discs that have the DTS track have engineers who specifically build out the DTS track to a higher quality than DTS. This is not true on all discs, but most. I will give an example later. 2nd When DTS is added to a DVD they increase the bandwidth of the DTS track as compared to the dolby digital track. So that is why you see 800Kbps DTS tracks and 400 Kbps Dolby Digital tracks. Many companies release receivers and preprocessors that are using a single cheaper dolby digital chip solution and a much more expensive and better designed DTS solution. Sony is notorious for this.

DTS in the theaters is 1.5Mbps so there is some degradation when bringing it to the masses, but it does not have to be better. A good example is a R2D2 copy of Jurassic Park. Both the DTS and dolby digital formats are wonderful. This is from hearing the movie on a $70,000 hometheater at a AVSForum meet. Another good example is The Fifth Element superbit edition. The dolby digital track is much higher quality at nearly 784Kbps so it sounds much better than many other movies. The DTS track is similar in quality and it would be very difficult if not impossible to tell the 2 apart.

Also remember tha the DTS track may be remixed by a different Sound Engineer than the Dolby Digital track. That can change the way things pan, move, and what speaker voices come from.
 
xonik said:
Wrong, DTS is compressed.
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Oops. I was wrong.

DTS has a 3:1 compression ratio versus Dolby Digital's 12:1. This gives DTS a
lot more data to deal with and they do indeed make excellent use of it
 
lol i think treyshadow just shut everyone up. hehe well this thread doesn't need to stay open anymore =P
 
Treyshadow said:
The dolby digital track is much higher quality at nearly 784Kbps so it sounds much better than many other movies. The DTS track is similar in quality and it would be very difficult if not impossible to tell the 2 apart.
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So you know, max bitrate on DD is 640kpbs, DTS half-bitrate [what you normally find on most DVD's] is 768kbps, while full-bitrate is unsurprisingly 1536kpbs, which stems from it being stored on CDs for use in theaters, as previously mentioned.
 
The other thing as well is that for most of the time, you are not going to have alot of sound going on anyways, so the bandwidth for either DD or DTS is going to be more than enough.

Its very rare to find a movie were every channel is maxing out the sound frequencies (I couldn't begin to imagine how that would sound)

In real life, if you had the same source/same audio engineer do both the DD and DTS the same, they would pretty much sound exactly the same.
 
DTS is usually better, on any media that has both, in my experience.

As previously mentioned, that is owed more to who and how it was mixed than the inherent technical differences between DD and DTS.


lol, and the piano intro does kick ass. my neighbors probably have that sequence memorized by now.
 
BO(V)BZ said:
So you know, max bitrate on DD is 640kpbs, DTS half-bitrate [what you normally find on most DVD's] is 768kbps, while full-bitrate is unsurprisingly 1536kpbs, which stems from it being stored on CDs for use in theaters, as previously mentioned.
Click to expand...

Not always on a CD. A lot of times the digital data is printed on the film itself. It's just run through an external "decoder" before going into the projector. Even SDDS is like this.
 
badasspenguin said:
Not always on a CD. A lot of times the digital data is printed on the film itself. It's just run through an external "decoder" before going into the projector. Even SDDS is like this.
Click to expand...

True today, but back in the beginning DTS was distributed soley via CD, hence the post =]
 
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