Uncompressed or Dolby Digital?

[DaViD Boulet]

TrueHD upon decompression is a bit-for-bit identical copy of the uncompressed PCM source from which it is taken, so it should be no better or no worse. See the post directly above.

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.