Is Warner changing to DTS-HD Master Audio too?

[Rik1138]

Originally Posted by Petra_Kalbrain

Besides, when it comes right down to it (despite the fact that all lossless codecs SHOULD sound the same), there are a number of people who express that they have put titles back on the shelf because it contained a TrueHD track instead of DTS HD or PCM. I am one of those. With volume matching, EVERY TrueHD track aside from The Dark Knight sounds a bit bland to me, whereas EVERY DTS HD track sparks with exubrent life.

The problems with comments like this are:

1- the processing of Dolby and DTS are handled separately in your receiver. You might have your Dolby decoder configured in a way that makes the sound seem 'duller'. After properly calibrating my system, I can't tell the difference between THD and DTSMA when I switch back and forth between them...

2- How many of these 'bland' TrueHD tracks have you compared, _directly_ with DTS-HDMA? You can't say they THD track on one movie doesn't sound as good as the DTS track on a completely different movie, and blame it on the audio encode. That's just stupid. You need to listen to the exact same audio track in both formats, and configure your system so both audio tracks sound the same. Then see if you still think THD sounds worse than DTSMA. There's demo and setup discs that can offer you this.

If you take a .WAV file, encode it to THD and DTSMA, and then decode back to WAV, you get a bit-for-bit perfect copy of the file.

Don't get me wrong, I prefer DTS-HDMA myself, but that's mainly because it's so much easier to work with on the production side (encodes 100s times faster than THD, there's a PC based encoder, only need to encode one stream, can easily make accommodations for seamless branching, etc...) THD really is a pain to work with. I wouldn't be surprised if that's one of the main reasons some studios are switching.