DVD vs Blu-ray (Audio)

[chriharr]

The difference in clarity is easy. Lossless wins hands down everytime.

However I don't mind legacy codecs, in fact I couldn't care less for lossless audio, I don't need it with such a small setup that I have.

I would prefer to have a lossless setup, but I won't fork out the cash for a new system and speakers until I get my house to put them in first.

I play my blu-rays discs in either DD or DTS, and if either one of those codecs isn't available my reciever converts the 2ch PCM stream into 5.1 Dolby Prologic 2 surround sound. It sounds perfect to me.

If blu-ray wasn't backwards compatible with older technology I wouldn't have bought into the format

In the past I preferred the DTS audio tracks everytime, they sounded much clearer than Dolby Digital and the center speaker and LFE had more natural punch IMHO, now that blu-ray offers me higher bit rates on those legacy codecs I can now enjoy the formats I've always loved with higher bit rates

And with the core DTS track being 1.5Mbps (that's slightly higher than the bit rate of a compact disc) I can get (almost uncompressed sounding) audio with a slightly higher resolution than a CD. That's awesome in my books.

Dolby Digital has an extra 192Kbps added to it to make it 640Kbps and the difference is quite noticeable to me, it sounds almost the same as a 750Kbps DTS track and most DVD's that feature DTS tracks are encoded at 750Kbps because 1.5Mbps takes up way too much space on a DL DVD disc.

I love my legacy codecs and won't part with them for at least the next 10 years.