Poll: Should Sony use DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby TrueHD?

[H9k_]

DTS-HD MA with 1.5mbit core for the ancient ppl. That way everyone benefit.

[Intamin]

It doesn't matter as far as lossless goes. To quote Sir Terrance, the sound insider here:

"listen. We have carefully compared our masters with both Dts MA lossless and Dolby TrueHD encodes, THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE PERIOD!!!! 12 audio engineers, highly experience engineers with excellent hearing participated in this DBT, and no one could tell the difference between our masters and the codec encoded output.

1. Your rooms are not audio labs. It does not have the acoustical control to make accurate comparisons.

2. Nobody hearing is tested, so how do you account for mismatch frequency responses between your two ears, not to mention level differences.

3. I know of nobody here who has the necessary equipment to level match down below .5db, let alone 1.0db or 1.5db.

4. A Blu-ray disc is a terrible medium to test off of. No soundtrack is mixed or tweaked exactly the same, so comparing different soundtracks in order to get a result is silly enterprise not worth chasing after.

5. Sighted testing is useless as it invites bias.

6. When you examine the waveforms of each of the testing forms, they are all the same. That means there are no audible differences between them.

7. Lossless is lossless. There is no better lossless than the next, unless one is mixed and eq'd more dynamically than the other.

8. We are more subject to hearing biases than we care to admit to. Especially if we know what the source is.

9. How many here have a neutral room that adds no sonic signature to the mix? Nobody. How many here have speakers with a flat broadband frequency response in room? Nobody. If you purchase speakers from most known speaker manufacturers, your speakers are probably not flat even in a anechoic chamber, which makes them unsuitable for testing.

10. Did I say lossless is lossless no matter which codec is involved?"

But if there are still a ton of people without HD audio, then I guess go ahead and switch so that they can get better core.

[Dan S.]

I'm fine with Dolby TrueHD. There is the DD track for those who can't decode it. Most every player out there DOES decode it. As long as Sony stays away from the dialnorm knob I have no complaints.

[AlaskaDon]

I know this is very subjective, but I don't believe that there is no difference. DTS-HD Master always sounds better to me than TrueHD. I should qualify that by saying that I do have some significant hearing loss in the higher frequencies, and that could very well have something to do with it. DTS-HD is always more clear for me, and just sounds better overall when compared to TrueHD at the same volume. As I said, very subjective. Not being a sound guy, I can't definitively say why.

[FreddieFerric]

I voted to drop Dolby TrueHD. In my opinion the Blu's that have the DTS MA tracks sound superior to any of the Dolby TrueHD tracks that I've heard. I am so convinced of the decided superiority in the DTS format that I always check the audio listing on the back of the case and am always disappointed that a movie that I wanted only has a TrueHD track.

This idea that both lossless formats should have no effect on the sound is great theory that doesn't translate to "ears in the theater" results.

[cartman781]

I prefer DTS-HD MA

[Intamin]

Originally Posted by AlaskaDon

I know this is very subjective, but I don't believe that there is no difference. DTS-HD Master always sounds better to me than TrueHD. I should qualify that by saying that I do have some significant hearing loss in the higher frequencies, and that could very well have something to do with it. DTS-HD is always more clear for me, and just sounds better overall when compared to TrueHD at the same volume. As I said, very subjective. Not being a sound guy, I can't definitively say why.

It's not subjective at all. Please read my post quoting Sir Terrance, the blu-ray sound insider and sound engineer.

[tvine2000]

Originally Posted by trans22

i would say yes, i really hate truehd most of the time it just sounds the same as dolby digital, i recently bought underworld: rise of the lycans and that sounds terrible, the dialogue is way too quiet. dts hd has more volume and superior clarity and usually a higher bit rate.

louder doesn't make it better.the dialogue quiet is the way they mixed it.
try the blind fold test,i bet you won't hear any difference between the two.

[tvine2000]

Originally Posted by Intamin

It doesn't matter as far as lossless goes. To quote Sir Terrance, the sound insider here:

"listen. We have carefully compared our masters with both Dts MA lossless and Dolby TrueHD encodes, THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE PERIOD!!!! 12 audio engineers, highly experience engineers with excellent hearing participated in this DBT, and no one could tell the difference between our masters and the codec encoded output.

1. Your rooms are not audio labs. It does not have the acoustical control to make accurate comparisons.

2. Nobody hearing is tested, so how do you account for mismatch frequency responses between your two ears, not to mention level differences.

3. I know of nobody here who has the necessary equipment to level match down below .5db, let alone 1.0db or 1.5db.

4. A Blu-ray disc is a terrible medium to test off of. No soundtrack is mixed or tweaked exactly the same, so comparing different soundtracks in order to get a result is silly enterprise not worth chasing after.

5. Sighted testing is useless as it invites bias.

6. When you examine the waveforms of each of the testing forms, they are all the same. That means there are no audible differences between them.

7. Lossless is lossless. There is no better lossless than the next, unless one is mixed and eq'd more dynamically than the other.

8. We are more subject to hearing biases than we care to admit to. Especially if we know what the source is.

9. How many here have a neutral room that adds no sonic signature to the mix? Nobody. How many here have speakers with a flat broadband frequency response in room? Nobody. If you purchase speakers from most known speaker manufacturers, your speakers are probably not flat even in a anechoic chamber, which makes them unsuitable for testing.

10. Did I say lossless is lossless no matter which codec is involved?"

But if there are still a ton of people without HD audio, then I guess go ahead and switch so that they can get better core.

i agree man and sadly people don't relize these are two companys are trying to get your dollar.it like buying a tv or a bd player,all of them try get you to think there product ''a'' is better then ''b'' and the pr dept writes it up that way.


i don't hear any difference myself and my hearing is good,its all in the mind.
the thing is people belive what they want....let them ,who cares i don't.

[AlaskaDon]

Originally Posted by Intamin

It's not subjective at all. Please read my post quoting Sir Terrance, the blu-ray sound insider and sound engineer.

I'm not sure how you define subjective, but for me when something appears or seems to be so in the absence of anything quantifiable, that's subjective.

[Intamin]

Originally Posted by AlaskaDon

I'm not sure how you define subjective, but for me when something appears or seems to be so in the absence of anything quantifiable, that's subjective.

When a sound engineer who does mixing of audio tracks for a living states "When you examine the waveforms of each of the testing forms, they are all the same" as well as "12 audio engineers, highly experience engineers with excellent hearing participated in this DBT, and no one could tell the difference between our masters and the codec encoded output," it is no longer subjective.

[AlaskaDon]

And as I stated, I hear a difference SUBJECTIVELY. Apparently from the poll results so far I'm not the only one. There's really no point in turning this into an argument. The poll asks for your opinion. You gave yours, I gave mine. They happen to be different but that's ok.

[Intamin]

Originally Posted by AlaskaDon

And as I stated, I hear a difference SUBJECTIVELY. Apparently from the poll results so far I'm not the only one. There's really no point in turning this into an argument. The poll asks for your opinion. You gave yours, I gave mine. They happen to be different but that's ok.

And I'm saying the opinion of the two sounding different has been proven wrong by science, it is not subjective, and that this pole has been done ad infinitum. One final quote, since people seem to base the so called "differences" by listening to different movies and thinking that somehow that is an indicator "4. A Blu-ray disc is a terrible medium to test off of. No soundtrack is mixed or tweaked exactly the same, so comparing different soundtracks in order to get a result is silly enterprise not worth chasing after. "

Finally, to anyone who says there is a difference, please buy this. It has pcm, true hd, and dts hd ma, all on the same mix. Test for yourselves, just don't forget to turn up the true hd mix to attempt to normalize it for volume differences.

[AlaskaDon]

Jeeze man, Lighten up. Everybody has their own opinion on this. No need to try and convince everyone that yours happens to be right. I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.

[Alan Gordon]

Originally Posted by Intamin

this pole has been done ad infinitum.

While I know what you are saying, this poll has never been done before, as it was just asked today on what people's thoughts regarding Sony possibly switching to DTS-HD MA were.

~Alan

[Intamin]

Originally Posted by AlaskaDon

Jeeze man, Lighten up. Everybody has their own opinion on this. No need to try and convince everyone that yours happens to be right. I guess we will just have to agree to disagree.

The point I'm apparently failing to make is that this is not an opinion that I hold, it's proven science. You could have the opinion that 2+2=5, and science would tell you it's wrong and the answer is 4. If you want to say I hold the opinion that 2+2=4, that would be incorrect as it is not an opinion, just like science says the waveforms are identical and that the tracks are bit for bit identical to the original mix, and therefore the codec has no baring on the sound.

And Alan, touche. I was just driving at the bigger picture of "x codec > y codec."

[got rice]

On the flip side, those who have an older AVR, use analog out and let the player decode may have a problem getting dts-ma, due to the fact that many of these BDP's don't decode dts-ma. ie Sony 300/301, Pioneer 51fd.

With this in mind I like that Sony uses Dolby True HD.

Plus I see no reason to change what works.

[Hep]

I will always side on the side of science, and in this case it is definitive: PCM, DTS HDMA, and True HD all produce an identical waveform. That said, I did answer "yes" because I feel empathy for anyone without access to the lossless codecs, and having a DTS core would make me happy if I were in that situation.

[Cinema Squid]

Originally Posted by Hep

I will always side on the side of science, and in this case it is definitive: PCM, DTS HDMA, and True HD all produce an identical waveform.

The only problem with this statement is that it is not always necessarily true in a real-world environment. Dialnorm settings and average decibel levels are the common culprits for subjective perceptual differences, but there have been frequent cases of monkey-business going on with TrueHD tracks with least-significant-bits sample truncation and even different bit-depths allocated across the channels. Maybe in these cases it is an accurate reflection of the source, but I somehow doubt it - obviously I cannot prove this since I do not have the uncompressed source files to measure error.

In principle, "lossless" means that all tracks should decode to the same digital waveform that they were encoded from exactly sample-by-sample with no error, but this does not appear to always be the case in practice. Whether or not one can actually hear these differences on level-matched tracks is another story (well, a short story, since you almost definitely can't), but I am inclined to agree with your general point and say that they are effectively perceptually identical and that the choice of lossless codec does not matter other than for bandwidth and legacy compatibility concerns.

[Canada]

I prefer DTS MA over True HD. It has a higher bitrate, and the companies don't have to sacrifice picture quality for DTS MA.

There are only three North American that I am aware of that still use Dolby True HD.

Sony
WB ( I hope that they will some day use a 24 bit audio master.)
and Paramount