Dolby Digital EX vs. Multichannel PCM on non Blu-ray movies

[kitkat99]

Curious what people think is better to listen to the dolby digital ex sountrack or have it played in THX EX or play it in multichannel.

can it actually even seperate in multichannel?

Receiver is onkyo 805.

Which is better???
Again NON Blur ray movies

[DaViD Boulet]

it all depends.

pcm doesn't add additional steps that degrade the signal like many Dolby (even TrueHD) tracks do.

But all things being equal, they should be the same (ie no DN applied to TrueHD and the same bit-depth for each stream).

[Chad Varnadore]

Originally Posted by kitkat99

Curious what people think is better to listen to the dolby digital ex sountrack or have it played in THX EX or play it in multichannel.

can it actually even seperate in multichannel?

Receiver is onkyo 805.

Which is better???
Again NON Blur ray movies

You're not going to find multi-channel PCM outside of BD. DVDs disc capacity won't support it and I don't believe spec does either. Regardless tereo PCM is all you're going to run across outside of BD. And that's mostly limited to concerts.

DD EX and THX EX are the same, the later just has THX post processing applied. Many films these days are re-eq'd for the home environment for DVD already. So you've got to play it by ear on a case by case basis. Room acoustics will also have some impact on personal preference.