Fox: Please Drop DTS-MA for Dolby TrueHD (1 Viewer)

[Edwin-S]

I must have missed the part of the discussion that establishes that fact. Is it earlier in this thread? As for the Letters track, I cannot confirm that for myself so I'll take your word for it. If that is the case I cannot argue that DolbyTHD is less efficient than DTS. I just want the choice of what I listen to. It shouldn't just be Dolby or........Dolby.

 

[Douglas Monce]

Your not suggesting having two lossless tracks on a disc are you? That seems to me to be a serious waste of space. Particularly when you consider that NO ONE can even play DTS MA at this point.

Doug

 

[Edwin-S]

No worse than having PCM and DolbyTHD on the same disc; however, I'm not really advocating for two lossless tracks on a disc. I just don't like the idea of one company having a monopoly. I like the idea that if a studio decides to use DTS HD MA then they should be able to use it; therefore, future equipment should support all available codecs. There are some people here who seem to think that Dolby should be the only game in town.......period. As long as there is competition then these companies always try to improve their products. Once there is only one dominant company the attitude becomes "screw it.....take what we give you because we are the only game in town anyway".

I expect the inability to play DTS HD MA tracks to rectify itself. DTS isn't about to roll over and give the home video market away to Dolby. That is what I mean by competition.

 

[PeterTHX]

Well it seems Dolby has been the one innovating and DTS the follow-up.

Dolby: AC-3 Theatrical 1991
DTS: Theatrical 1993 (forced by Universal on "Jurassic Park")
Dolby: AC-3 LaserDiscs 1995
DTS: DTS LDs 1996 (again, Universal)
Dolby: DD mandatory on DVD, ready for launch 1996-97
DTS: not ready. Shows up on DVD in 1998 after promising VBR, then 1500kbps, then 768kbps.
Dolby: DD+ and TrueHD, ready for HD DVD and Blu-ray launch 2005-2006
DTS: We got DTS-HD and DTS-MA! Go ahead and encode and we'll decode later. DTS-HD finally decoded by Panasonic April/May 2007. DTS-MA still MIA.

 

[Douglas Monce]

Well to be fair DTS has kinda done it to themselves. They either don't have the monetary backing, or the business acumen to truly compete in the marketplace with a company like Dolby.

And Dolby is hardly sitting back and coasting. From the very start of the company they have been about improving the quality of audio. Even before they had any competition. You may disagree with their methodology, but you can't say that they aren't constantly trying to improve their product.

Doug

 

[Jeff Adkins]

I should clarify what I meant about TrueHD being the farthest from the master of the three. TrueHD, DTS-MA, and PCM are indeed all equal provided that DN is not used. According to Paidgeek at Sony, DN is turned on by default on TrueHD. All reports I've read are that every TrueHD track released to date has DN with the exception of Sony's Stomp The Yard and a few music titles such as Nine Inch Nails:Beside You In Time. The studio masters do not have DN, therefore PCM and DTS-MA will provide the closest possible replication of the master assuming we're comparing 24-bit vs 24-bit, or 16-bit vs. 16-bit. Why does that sound so absurd to people to want the closest possible to the master? Take DN away and I could care less if it's PCM, DTS-MA, or TrueHD. Comparisons of the BD and HD-DVD versions of The Departed have already shown a slight difference between having DN and not having it. Sure, it's only a *slight* difference, but I don't see any reason for it to be there at all. If the other studios besides Sony want to turn it off, then that's terrific. It certainly doesn't take more space or bandwidth to turn off the DN.

 

[PeterTHX]

Well the studios see value in DN and even DTS saw fit enough to add it to their HD solutions (again, copying Dolby).

 

[Douglas Monce]

This assumes that DN actually makes a difference to the sound other than setting a particular volume level, and there is no convincing evidence that it does, just a lot of opinions.

Doug

 

[Cees Alons]

Jeff,

DialNorm ensures a better reconstruction of the original signal in your audio chain. If the paid geek that is said to have listened to those a-technical people at another forum is right when he told them Sony won't use it, then several of Sony audio tracks might be farther away from the original than they need to.
I must add here that it's probably marginal, but nevertheless so.

Therefore, TrueHD is able to help you get MORE CLOSE to a lossless reproduction of the sound, provided the technician uses DialNorm when applicable and correctly! Not the other way around!


(And I must say it's rather funny how people choose their arguments: at one place there's a screaming that one of the existing (sic!) HD formats should go away, so the "war" would be over - even when others are arguing that having competition is the best - and then there's suddenly another argument that a slightly inferior and currently unusable compression codec should be installed at all cost to produce ... competition. )


Cees

 

[Jeff Adkins]

First off, let me preface this by saying I am by no means an expert at this stuff. But I do read a lot and I trust the opinions very highly of certain members of this forum (including many of those who have replied to me here) in addition to several people at AVS. One thing I do trust is my ears and so far the discs I own with lossless audio simply trounce the Dolby Digital tracks encoded at 640 kbps. It's not even close on my system, and I don't have what would be considered an audiophile system. So, lossless audio for all future releases on either format is my primary concern. I am not anti-Dolby or pro-DTS or pro-PCM, just pro-lossless. When a film like The Prestige sounds light-years ahead of Mission Impossible III, it saddens me to think that so many people just accept it as "good enough" because it's "an improvement over the standard DVD. These new optical formats should be all about taking advantage of the best that is possible. Studios like Sony and Disney have proven what is possible with every release. I was never an advocate for full-bitrate DTS on standard DVD because the bandwidth was too low. However, bandwidth and disc space is plentiful on BD and even in most cases on HD-DVD.

So having said that about lossless, we all know that PCM is very inefficient. As we start seeing titles with more extras, interactivity, HDI, BD-J, etc., one of the next-gen codecs would obviously be a better way to go. Both DTS-MA and Dolby TrueHD can provide a bit-for-bit replication of a PCM track using far less space. Now, here's what the review at Hidef Digest said comparing the PCM and TrueHD tracks of The Departed:

 

[Robert George]

I'm not particularly a fan of the use of dialnorm on prerecorded media (DVD, or HD optical), but I also am not a fan of misrepresentation of fact, whether intentional or through misunderstanding of the technical data.

The only point that I will make is that dialnorm does NOT degrade the fidelity of the encoded audio in an of itself. All dialnorm does is lower the overall output level of the decoder by a value set by the technician encoding the audio. The PERCEPTION that dialnorm is somehow degrading the audio comes from a very simple psychoacoustic phenomenon. Humans tend to think something louder sounds "better". since DTS and PCM do not have this feature, any audio data encoded with dialnorm in a Dolby format and also in either DTS or uncompressed PCM will sound different. Most people will perceive that difference as the louder being the "better" sounding in a subjective sense.

BTW, this is not new information. Technical data on dialnorm has been readily available from Dolby Labs for many years.

 

[Edwin-S]

Comparing the two cases is apples to oranges. And I never said that DTS HD MA should be installed at all cost.

 

[Cees Alons]

But unfortunately, it's pure nonsense. Nothing is "recoded". DN is a value to tell you at what dB level the signal was placed on the track (people who used to record tapes know what I mean) and the value is necessary again at the decoding stage to get the original signal. Many soundtracks don't need it, but some (lower sound level) tracks would "drown" a bit more in the noise and thus would be worse at your ears if you don't use the whole 24-bit space to code it and even more when you would have to turn up your volume manually and start hearing more noise.

You don't have to believe me, but don't believe everything else either. And, BTW, DN is not a "bit": it's a 5-bit value (31 steps, denoting a dB level).

DN is fine, but because people can make mistakes, I would want a button to switch the correction off at play-back and adjust it manually. But it's NOT destroying the signal, it's the equivalent of turning your volume dial! Do you feel you're destructively recoding your sound whenever you do that?


Cees

 

[Manus]

Valuable space on Sd was wasted for years with 2 soundtracks ( DD and dts ), eventually contributing to the premature , IMO , downfall of Sd at least in the industry's eyes . Surely we're not considering dual soundtracks again just to satisfy the hypnotized 'dts is awesome ' fantasists ?

Fox's affair with dts illustrates yet again that BD was not actually ready for launch and why their constant 'War-what-War' ? press mumblings are being used to buy the time they need to catch up .

Love the Bose analogy

On the very best equipment the supposed / imagined never really materialised for me .

Cees , you've nailed it again . If competition is a good thing , then lets get the studios to release on both HD formats ( Frankensteins ? ) Why kill one format off a la Digital Bits ( if it doesnt die naturally ) when both will probably die when Hd downloads become more easily technically possible Dolby's developmental history was pretty good before dts turned up , and it will probably still be pretty good long after they are gone.

Enjoy whatever you watch/listen , thats more important !

~M~

 

[Edwin-S]

There are plenty of people who are not interested in digital downloading of content. I happen to be one of them. I'm not interested in downloading music, TV, or movies. I want to be able to get my films on a physical media. I'm not interested in giving MS even more market power than they already have. People are complaining about DRM on these disc formats. They haven't seen anything yet. If digital downloading becomes the norm the DRM schemes implemented will make anything on BD or HD DVD look like a godsend.

 

[Robert George]

In reality, it doesn't. These are separate but related issues. DTS-HD MA was put into use on the software side long before there was hardware decoding support. As was the case with DVD in '97, DTS was late to the party. they didn't want to be left off the HD formats so they pretty much forced their way into the standards committees even though they did not have a viable format other than a theoretical on paper. Now, a year after the launch of Blu-ray, and more than a year after the launch of HD DVD, there is still no hardware support for DTS-HD MA yet Fox continues to cling to that format. Well, I guess they are still clinging to it. If they every release any more titles on Blu-ray, we will see what they use for audio formats.

Blu-ray is little different, and that isn't even a debate. There is no way anyone can legitimately claim a format that does not even have a finalized spec a year after it was released to the marketplace is "ready for launch".

 

[Shawn Perron]

Nor can a format that people have to boil the media to get it to play be considered "ready for launch". If both formats had truly waited until they were "ready for launch", we'd probably be looking at sometime this fall or winter. Both formats were atleast a year early jumping the gun racing to make it into the marketplace. The worst aspect of this format war is probably the fact that the consumers were beta testers for the manufacturers and studios. If the formats had waited until they were ready, Blu-Ray would have a finalized spec at launch and HD-DVD would have had far fewer problems with unreliable media shipping to customers.

 

[Robert George]

Shawn,

You are playing the typical Blu-ray shill. You are trying to divert the attention away from the shortcomings of Blu-ray by attempting to discredit HD DVD, falsely I will add.

Just for the record, the HD DVD spec was finalized and all players have been designed to comply with that spec since the first player and first discs were released 14 months ago. This "disc boiling" issue is a total red herring. You are referring to the internet postings of a literal handful of laymen. This is not in any way a legitimate solution of any verified problem with hardware or software.

For the record, the only repeatable compatibility issues with HD DVD have been manufacturing errors resulting in OUT OF SPEC combo discs. If you don't know the difference between this and an incomplete spec, perhaps you should limit your comments to areas you do understand. Certainly, responding to half truths and fabrications is beneath this forum.

 

[Shawn Perron]

I own both formats, and buy media for neither. At this point, I've stopped caring who wins as long as one of them does. People come in here and make sweeping statement of opinion like:


One of the main reasons to come to this forum is because it's generally civil here with a certain level of respect for others. This part of your post is the total opposite of that respect. Just because your opinion differs from mine, there is no reason to start calling people ignorant. It must be nice to know everything while others know nothing.

 

[Robert George]

I have the utmost respect for the truth and an honest, objective discourse in the pursuit of same.

I am well aware of the extent of Toshiba's design limitations and what of that is related to the format and what is simply a new design. What I don't do is throw up Blu-ray's problems whenever someone mentions a problem with HD DVD.

People like you, Shawn, have nothing other than the demand for respectability claiming your opinion is as valid as others. For you to gain respect for your opinions, you will have to base those opinions on reality and honesty. When you have that, then come looking for respect.