Why are Some Studios just Dabbling in DTS? (1 Viewer)

[Ed Vandeweerd]

An Open Letter to All Studios

Hi
As an avid Collector of DVD's and an ardent fan of DTS Why is it that Studios such as MGM, Warner, & Paramount are only dabbling in dts? To Date MGM has only released "Hannibal" in DTS, Paramount "The Jack Ryan Trilogy", Warner "Lethal Weapon's 1, 2 & 3, "Dreamscape". It would seem to me that in addition to revisiting back catalogue titles that consideration should also be given to profitable current releases for consideration in dts?
I Firmly believe that if Warner had released "The Matrix" in dts that they would not have jumped off of the dts Bandwagon after their perceived failure to generate perspective sales of these back catalogue titles. Paramount would in my view do extremely well with the Star Trek SE's particularly if consideration were given to dts tracks. MGM the same with your James Bond Franchise.
Perhaps the decision making process should be put in the hands of Consumers via this Forum in terms of which titles truly warrant the dts treatment and taken out of the Boardroom?? Thoughts??

 

[Robert Franklin]

You forgot to mention "Die Another Day" from MGM. And Columbia/Tri-Star will only release Superbit titles with DTS. Unfortunately, it seems like CTS will no longer release Superbit titles. What a shame, I could see the difference on my projector, and its not even HD!! Buddy, I fully agree with you when it comes to DTS. I personally believe that the DVD Forum rushed its decision to mandate Dolby for DVD. I believe DD sounds good, but its often colored by over compression (12:1) vs. DTS (4:1). Its bit word length is 12 bit versus DTS's 20-bit. Also, there are other things that Dolby has that irritates me. Mainly this Dialog Normalization. Its very frustrating when watching a movie and someone whispers something and you have to rewind and perhaps turn the volume to understand what is being said. DTS doesn't have those problems and limitations. I wish that DTS was the standard and NOT Dolby.

I also agree that the studios should put both sound formats on DVD, even if they have to put extras on the second disc. I don't like extras anyway, that is why I loved the Superbit titles. If you can fit a 3-hour movie with Full bit-rate DTS (The Thin Red Line), and (Meet Joe Black) with Half Bit-rate, then you can fit it on almost every disc on the market. Its funny because I have seen bootleg DVDs from other countries that have DTS with the same features as the Region 1 DVDs without DTS. What gives? Let's hope that Paramount releases more titles with DTS. It seems to take a Studio a little over a year before they release more titles with DTS. Let's hope that Paramount will at least continue the tradition, and then move on to release more and more titles with DTS. That would include other studios as well. But, Warner will no longer release any more titles with DTS. It seems as though Dolby has their pocket. When Warner agreed to release movies with DTS, who came in as stated that there was no need, because they sound the same? Dolby. There are many people out their that can actually tell the difference, and I don't mean a perceived loudness. There are things that just pop when you playback DTS.

Well, the bottom line is: we should have DD and DTS on all discs. Or at least given a choice of what we want to purchase. It looks like FOX is releasing D-VHS titles with Full Bit-Rate. Too bad for DVD.

 

[Michael Reuben]

Regardless of where one stands on the issue, the studios are unlikely to be impressed by appeals based on such gross mistatements of the applicable technical details. Specifically:

1. Both DD and DTS are capable of handling word lengths up to 24 bits. The most common word length on DVDs is 16 bits, for both DD and DTS.
2. Dialogue normalization does not affect the level of dialogue relative to the rest of the soundtrack. If you have to turn up the sound, blame the mixing engineer, your system calibration or your room accoustics. The audio format has nothing to do with it.
3. Comparisons of compression ratios are meaningless when different codecs are involved. I could create a low compression codec of 2:1 by simply removing every other bit in the bitstream, but I doubt the results would sound very good.[/list=1]
   M.