- Aug 1, 2019
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How can DTS compete with the streaming domination of Dolby Atmos?
Is the DTS vs Dolby war effectively over? : Read more
Is the DTS vs Dolby war effectively over? : Read more
Many thanks for your kind words - yes, the Q950A is about as good as soundbars get; that's a Sound+Image award-winner! Nice kit pairing there; never be afraid to mix brands, even fierce competitors! And good point, the higher the kit, the more you need the codecs, as the better you can differentiate. B&W may not be supporting DTS on its soundbar, but the parent Sound United certainly continues to do so on its Denon/Marantz receivers etc. JezGreat article, was a great intro to non audiophiles to these various formats.
One thing I hate about the fact these companies don't pay for the DTS license, is that even if its use is getting more and more niche (bluray, or listening to blurays as remux files on plex, etc.), is that these soundbars or home theather products are sometimes high end. If I pay 2000 USD for a soundbar, you better pay the 10$ required to provide me the DTS:X format, even if I only use it once per year, because there is no way in my mind an expensive product like this shouldn't tick ALL the boxes.
This is why I'm happy with my Samsung Q950A and LG B9, both can still process dts:x
Woah there, your reply is long than my article! Some great stuff in there. I was perhaps too dismissive of psychoacoustic surround; some of the side-firing soundbars etc can certainly push things very wide; Sennheiser's Ambeo is the prime example, but I had a fairly lowly Hisense bar in for review recently which managed the trick with certain sounds. I just meant it's no substitute for real surround speakers, and I dislike the fact that so many companies pretend it is.As for experience surround sound that wasn't there. There are psycho acoustic phenomena's where you might experience something like that. Among my test tracks, I have a song from around the millennia, it is a dance track, and it has a Dolby Surround label on in. In certain playback scenarios though, through a stereo system with no dolby decoding capabilities, there is a part of the track that seemingly comes from behind you as listener. I have other tracks where the sound seems to come from all directions.
So it is possible to get a false surround experience through a stereo system, if the situation is just right.
That then also means that it is possible to create the experience of surround from a soundbar, but due to the limited set of situations where it would work well, and for the limited sweet-spot it would work for, it mostly doesn't work that well at all in actual home situations.
But I'm curious now that the technology of creating sound-beams actually are on its way to the market, I remember reading first about it in the 90s or early 00s. A soundbar would still be a bit limiting, but a limited numbers of actual boxes placed in a room, would be able to create pin-pointed sources of sound in many more locations, and we might actually see solutions where object data in the surround format could be used to create a moving sound-beam, to replace jumping between speakers.
If we are talking dying formats, I'm a bit sad to see 3D passed on....
Cheers, and yes, this was by no means a pro-Dolby article; there's much love among both consumers and industry for the efforts of DTS in quality terms... it's just struggling on quantity in the streaming market at present. Thanks for posting. Cheers, JezI just wanted to chime in and say DTS:X is by far better. My thoughts is some of the reason Atmos is winning is because Atmos is most of the time just a marketing tool allowed to be slapped on pretty much anything, even with music and movies that have little-to-no object based data at all. When I see 'Atmos' I rarely associate that with guaranteed quality. When I see DTS:X... I expect it to be really good quality mix. I prefer their upmixer as well.
I agree with the lower bandwidth making sense to push Atmos. But this is further proof this Atmos offering is a lie to consumers saying you are getting the next generation development when really your getting the cheapest low effort mix you possibly could get.
I really hope you are wrong and we can get some services to stream the many movies that have DTS:X tracks available and perhaps more adoption will come as people start realizing it's often a better indicator of quality.
2.1 = Stereo Speakers + Mono Subwoofer = NirvanaAnd mono!