Uncompressed or Dolby Digital?

[GoldenRedux]

Originally Posted by DaViD Boulet

this is only true if there is no dialog-normalization post-processing applied to the signal. DN processing is REQUIRED if the flag is set, in which case every bit-value is re-calculated and the amplitude of the waveform is reduced in the digital domain... think of it as down-scaling the audio prior to d/a.

This is one reason I don't like TrueHD as much as DTS MA. Dolby sets the DN flag as a matter of course during encoding... so only a mastering engineer really thinking about things would ever bother to modify the preset value.

Sony has taken great care to avoid DN flags on their TrueHD on BD titles. Sony, therefore, is the only studio releasing TrueHD streams that actually offer bit-for-bit accuracy during playback.

That's true, but I was referring to the compression algorithm itself, not dialnorm. DialNorm is an unfortunate 'feature' that never should have been allowed into a lossless format.