Educational request re: audio (1 Viewer)

[Mike Broadman]

Dear More Knowledgable About This Stuff Than I Am HTF Members,

I don't really know much about the different sound formats that pop up on DVD: Dolby, DTS, and other acronyms.

I know what 5.1 vs mono vs two channels is, of course, but not the difference between Dolby 5.1 and DTS, for example. I just know that I like the way DTS sounds better.

Can someone either give me a quick explanation or provide a link? Thanks in advance.

 

[Dave Morton]

DTS is less compressed.

 

[Ken_McAlinden]

They are different schemes for encoding multiple channels of music. I know that Dolby Digital compresses information in the frequency domain, stores the information as floating point numbers with dynamic bit allocation for the exponents and mantissas, has a compression scheme based on a perceptual model developed by Dolby, and becomes more efficient the more discrete channels are being encoded. I'm not sure how similar or different the DTS compression method is, but it typically uses much higher "bitrates", which means that it not only uses a different compression method, but also compresses less.

I am not using the term "compression" as it is used w.r.t. analog audio, but simply to mean a method for using fewer bits to represent a signal. Both DD and DTS are "lossy" compression schemes in that they do not reproduce the exact bitstream from which they were derived when uncompressed.

Regards,

 

[GlennH]

Some information is here:
Link Removed