In reply to:
That is what I remembered reading on the 'old' DTS website, for which I surfed before making my post to make sure those numbers were correct, but they completley revamped the site and I was unable to find it. As far as the technical details on that claim, they did not list the details, just the compression comparison of 1/4 to 1/16th.
Unfortunately both companies are making it difficult to compare apples to apples, and it works in DTS Inc's favour. Most people, myself included, prefer the sound of a DTS-encoded soundtrack - though no one can seem to put their finger on quite what sounds better about it.
Doing the math on 5.1 PCM audio - 6 discrete channels at 44.1/16 gives you a bitrate of 4.25MB/s, and if the claims above are true - that DTS uses 4:1 compression (encoding compression - not compression/limiting) - means they use about 1.06MB/s for what you hear on a DTS track. At 16:1 compression Dolby Digital would be using 0.27MB/s for their track. Since Dolby Digital sounds better than 1/4 as good as DTS, that would be proof that Dolby Labs' compression model is better than DTS' at a given bitrate.
In reply to:
As far as DTS format being louder...I guess I mostly notice it in the older DTS formatted DVDs, but whatever makes the sound seem louder, I know that I have to move the volume down a 1/4 inch when changing over from DD to DTS
Which makes perfect sense if you're listening to a heavily compressed (now we're talking about compression/limiting) source - the loudest parts of the source still can't be any louder than an uncompressed source, but the
average levels of the source are higher.
Dolby Labs really started the whole "compressed audio" evil with Dolby A Noise Reduction on cassette tapes. If you make the average level on a recording louder, you get a better signal to noise ratio (against tape hiss), and when the tape is played back in a Dolby A capable player, it has expander technology in it to pull the dynamic range back to somewhere near what it was.
So in an orchestral recording, your quiet flute upon recording would be forced up to, say twice it's actual loudness (which doubles the signal to noise ratio - the inherent noise floor of magnetic tape stays constant, but the program audio level is doubled) - then when the tape is played in a Dolby A deck, it's "expanded" to fill the dynamic range again (which in effect, gives you less "divisions" of range, but it cleans up the hiss, wow, flutter, etc)
Sadly I think the "engineers" of today listening to Dolby A Noise Reduction on non-Dolby equipment has led to the push to see how big they can get the "wall of sound"... how many times have guys here complained about digital clipping on new albums - Norah Jones was a big culprit from what I remember. Whether it's old analog guys assuming they can squeeze maybe just a dB or two of headroom out of a digital master (the answer is NO - there is NO headroom on a digital presentation) or if it's just the career-college mass-produced ProTools jockeys that have scuttled into the industry like cockroaches - audio mixing and mastering has suffered.
As much as I hate arena/prog/classic rock - the 70s Todd Rundgren era still exhibits some of the best engineering ever. I'm going to go wash my mouth out with soap now.
Bren R.
