DTS HD MASTER AUDIO vs DOLBY TRUE HD

[admin_exported]

Is it me or is Dts hd master audio sound much much better than dolby true hd.

why is it a lot of blu ray movies are in dts ma and not dolby true hd not that i am complaining as i prefer dts ma.

Please share your experiences with the 2 if you have any.

 

[audioidiot1]

hi bips

i must agree with you most of my bd are master hd and i must say i have no complaints on sound or vision.hopefully will be better after a few tweeks on my system

cheers

 

[professorhat]

Have heard some fantastic Dolby TrueHD soundtracks - Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Star Trek, Iron Man, Blade Runner and Any Given Sunday just to name a few.

I'm positive the quality of the soundtrack comes down purely to the quality of the transfer rather than which format is used.

 

[sonycentre]

yes both formats are lossless,and i love both,might just be my old ears but dolby true hd sounds more open to me,But dts hd master gives more deep sounding bass,same as the old dvd days dts was awesome on dvd.

 

[Anonymous]

So why is it that most blu ray dvds are in Dts MA is there a reason behind why a film company would choose dts over dolby

 

[sonycentre]

You tend to find that fox,lionsgate use dts hd master audio.whilst sony pictures,warner bros will tend to use dolby true hd,its down to the mastering studio where the discs are audio mastered.

 

[professorhat]

sonycentre:yes both formats are lossless,and i love both,might just be my old ears but dolby true hd sounds more open to me,But dts hd master gives more deep sounding bass,same as the old dvd days dts was awesome on dvd.

But then I'm not aware of any discs which have the same soundtrack in both formats, so how can you compare them? On DVD, DTS was techinically superior to Dolby Digital due to the higher bitrate and therefore less information was lost. With both TrueHD and MA being lossless though, this doesn't apply any more.

Bips:So why is it that most blu ray dvds are in Dts MA is there a reason behind why a film company would choose dts over dolby

I think it harks back to the fact that, in the past, standard DTS was better than Dolby Digital on DVD and people therefore assume that the same is true on Blu-Ray. Personally I'm not convinced this is the case.

 

[sonycentre]

Yes,thats true,but lossless or not sound engineers will use what what they think sounds best,the best comparison is gamer on blu-ray the us version is in 7.1,whilst the uk version is just 5.1,using two diffrent sound engineers.ther is alot more depth in the 7.1 version,and it has nothing to do with the extra 2 channels that are used.to me dts sound tighter,dolby sounds more open,but thats just what i hear.

 

[professorhat]

I can't believe it's down to the individual sound engineer which format is chosen - surely this decision comes from the studio / distributor and is more likely based on licensing costs rather than anything else I would have thought. The reason you get different formats being used in different countries is the differing distributor. As Ms Newsome pointed out on another thread, often the UK gets 5.1 tracks as the distributor needs to free up room on the disc for all the different language soundtracks required for the European release compared with the US release. And there's no way the 5.1 track is the same mix as the 7.1 track with just the extra 2 channels removed, so again, a comparison between the two isn't fair.

 

[sonycentre]

Ill leave that thought with you then.

 

[Anonymous]

Oddly, there are one or two discs that offer both lossless packaging formats (we've even got one in the office somewhere - it's a Japanese title I think, but forgive me, I can't remember the name).

Why include two competing formats on one disc? Can't think of a single sensible reason, quite frankly. So long as the sound included is of a half-decent quality in technical terms, I've always believed it's the sound designer (or designers) that makes the biggest difference to film sound, not the encoding system. Buy any movie with a soundtrack by Ben Burtt or Gary Rydstrom and you'll hear what I mean. Compared to that, the differences between DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD are small beer. Of course, if my new Blu-ray movie turned up with 384kbps Dolby Digital I'd be narked, but that's another issue.

By the by, I'm more than a little excited about the BD release of Saving Private Ryan (Rydstrom's finest hour, in my humble opinion).

 

[Frank Harvey]

professorhat:But then I'm not aware of any discs which have the same soundtrack in both formats, so how can you compare them? On DVD, DTS was techinically superior to Dolby Digital due to the higher bitrate and therefore less information was lost. With both TrueHD and MA being lossless though, this doesn't apply any more.You sort of get a feel for what's generally better sounding over a period of time. While there are some great True HD soundtracks out there, I tend to find more DTS-MA ones sound better. Just a generalisation, but my feelings nonetheless.

 

[professorhat]

sonycentre:Ill leave that thought with you then.

Which one's that?

 

[professorhat]

FrankHarveyHiFi:professorhat:But then I'm not aware of any discs which have the same soundtrack in both formats, so how can you compare them? On DVD, DTS was techinically superior to Dolby Digital due to the higher bitrate and therefore less information was lost. With both TrueHD and MA being lossless though, this doesn't apply any more.You sort of get a feel for what's generally better sounding over a period of time. While there are some great True HD soundtracks out there, I tend to find more DTS-MA ones sound better. Just a generalisation, but my feelings nonetheless.

Possibly, but is that just that the better soundtracks which have been produced happen to be encoded with DTS-MA? The fact that fantastic TrueHD ones exist suggest this...

Personally I'm with Mr Kerr - the talent of the engineers behind the soundtrack (and of course the time afforded to them) is of far more importance than which lossless encoding format was used.

 

[aliEnRIK]

DTS uses a higher bitrate than Dolby

'Lossless' means nothing really

 

[Anonymous]

Bips:Is it me or is Dts hd master audio sound much much better than dolby true hd.

why is it a lot of blu ray movies are in dts ma and not dolby true hd not that i am complaining as i prefer dts ma.

Please share your experiences with the 2 if you have any.

Dolby TrueHD offers bitrates of up to 18Mbps while DTS HD Master Audio offers bitrates of up to 24.5Mbps, so your ears as well as mine agree that DTS HD Master Audio is the superior choice between the two audio formats.

The higher the
rate, the better the quality.

 

[professorhat]

aliEnRIK:DTS uses a higher bitrate than Dolby

'Lossless' means nothing really

Besides, DTS-MA has a higher upper bitrate limit than TrueHD, but from my experience of Blu-Rays, in practise on actual soundtracks both seem to hover around the 3-4 Mbps range thus negating this benefit.

 

[Frank Harvey]

professorhat:As Ms Newsome pointed out on another thread, often the UK gets 5.1 tracks as the distributor needs to free up room on the disc for all the different language soundtracks required for the European release compared with the US release.

Which to me, begs the question about what's happened to all that extra space on Bluray discs. Using True HD and DTS-MA leaves more space than those that use PCM, so regardless of how many languages need to be catered for on a disc, there's no excuse for losing 2 channels which aren't even always in full use.

These film companies really need to sort their act out. I know it's a slightly different issue, but Pandorum states DTS 5.1 on the info on the back, uses a small DTS-MA logo on the front, and your only actual audio option is True HD. Apalling. It's not rocket science.

 

[professorhat]

FrankHarveyHiFi:
professorhat:As Ms Newsome pointed out on another thread, often the UK gets 5.1 tracks as the distributor needs to free up room on the disc for all the different language soundtracks required for the European release compared with the US release.

Which to me, begs the question about what's happened to all that extra space on Bluray discs. Using True HD and DTS-MA leaves more space than those that use PCM, so regardless of how many languages need to be catered for on a disc, there's no excuse for losing 2 channels which aren't even always in full use.

These film companies really need to sort their act out. I know it's a slightly different issue, but Pandorum states DTS 5.1 on the info on the back, uses a small DTS-MA logo on the front, and your only actual audio option is True HD. Apalling. It's not rocket science.

No argument from me on this one

 

[professorhat]

ValianTX:The higher the
rate, the better the quality.

With lossless formats, this isn't actually the case as no information is being lost. Dolby TrueHD just uses more efficient algorithms to achieve higher compression rates without losing data, thus the bitrate, in theory at least, is irrelevant.

However, does the extra processing required to achieve the greater compression affect the sound? Maybe, but as I say, all the Blu-Ray soundracks I've seen seem to top out at about 4 - 5 Mbps - well within the limits of both encoding formats and thus not really an issue.

 

[aliEnRIK]

FrankHarveyHiFi:
professorhat:As Ms Newsome pointed out on another thread, often the UK gets 5.1 tracks as the distributor needs to free up room on the disc for all the different language soundtracks required for the European release compared with the US release.

Which to me, begs the question about what's happened to all that extra space on Bluray discs. Using True HD and DTS-MA leaves more space than those that use PCM, so regardless of how many languages need to be catered for on a disc, there's no excuse for losing 2 channels which aren't even always in full use.

 

[Anonymous]

Indeed. The encoding question is a simple matter of cost against time: as you'll know, many discs aren't produced to suit a global requirement, but developed to suit local markets, which is why some releases have different audio formats in different parts of the world. Often the European-orientated encoding process will have different needs (and possibly less time or budget) than, say, the US operation - hence for example, channels of sound get trimmed away, or certain extra features get ditched.

 

[Anonymous]

professorhat:
ValianTX:The higher the
rate, the better the quality.

With lossless formats, this isn't actually the case as no information is being lost. Dolby TrueHD just uses more efficient algorithms to achieve higher compression rates without losing data, thus the bitrate, in theory at least, is irrelevant.

However, does the extra processing required to achieve the greater compression affect the sound? Maybe, but as I say, all the Blu-Ray soundracks I've seen seem to top out at about 4 - 5 Mbps - well within the limits of both encoding formats and thus not really an issue.

Thx Prof, but all this is way too technical for me. I will leave my ears to judge which is better although I strongly feel that DTS-HD MSTR Audio has the edge over Tru-HD, which just sounds a little muted in comparison.

 

[Sorreltiger]

The two formats don't work in quite the same way. The trend towards DTS Master discs is explained more by the need to include what is sometimes called a 'legacy' soundtrack for folks without the capacity to play the HD one.

This is completely separate on a Dolby TrueHD disc, so that both soundtracks take up a lot of space. DTS Master works with a common core soundtrack (DTS) and the HD material on an extension, thus taking up less space on the disk.

Film companies want to use space on the disk for 'extras' in addition to the movie itself and as the DTS system leaves more room for that it has become more popular.

The different processing required by a blu-ray player or receiver for each format might, I suppose, influence the final sound, despite both lossless soundtracks being theoretically the same!

Incidentally, I have also read that DTS Master soundtracks can stream at a marginally higher constant bit-rate, but I don't know enough to say whether this is of any significance.

Sorry guys - I see I've repeated some of your stuff as it took me so long to write my post (feeling slow as it's late!)

 

[Anonymous]

But to reiterate the point at hand, ValianTX, how do you know that for certain? I'm not for one moment disputing that you're hearing a difference between discs, or in any way attempting to be rude: what I'm trying to suggest is that the differences you're hearing might not necessarily be entirely due to the audio codec you're using. They could be down to the skill of the sound designers involved.

Here's a great example: The Dark Knight. Now that's in Dolby TrueHD. Surely you don't think that sounds muted, do you?