Difference between PCM and DTS MA and Dolby TrueHD

[blueraybum]

I am thinking about getting a new reciever. I was curious if someone who has heard a movie in DTS MA or Dolby Digital TrueHD could help me out. Is there a big difference between a PCM uncompressed track and the Dolby TrueHD and DTS MA tracks.

[gvortex7]

I can tell you this much: LPCM is much better than Dolby TrueHD. I finally received the remastered version of The Fifth Element from Sony yesterday, and I proceeded to watch it last night. At the beginning of the movie I was switching back and forth between LPCM and Dolby TrueHD for about 15 minutes and came to the definite conclusion that LPCM is just way more dynamic and powerful sounding than TrueHD. It was very noticeable.

I can't really comment on DTS-HD MA because I've never heard it full fledged yet, only down-rezzed.

[welwynnick]

There are lots of complicated and confusing differences between the different codecs that I readily admit I don't fully understand, though I'm starting to get there. Even the lossy and lossless formats cause contention for those with cloth ears, but lossless is a different matter.

I wouldn't expect there to be a significant difference between lossless compressed (DTHD & DTS MA) and LPCM where the audio formats are the same (24/48 etc). BUT the former are more likely to have a better format: 24 bits instead of 16, 96kHz sampling instead of 48, for example. In that case, with a suitable system, I would expect the lossless compressed to be better than LPCM. Either way, I really wouldn't expect a big difference between them. Where there is a large difference, I expect that would be down to the system rather than the formats - downsampling of lossless compressed to DD or DTS for example - which is where the differences really are large.

I'm all in favour of the best possible audio - lets have 24bits + 96kHz for everything please - but I won't expect it to be a huge improvement over even DD+. Not promoting HDDVD here - I'm TrueBlu and would love to be proved wrong.

The other big issue for me is the real difference between DTHD and DTS HD MA, which everyone is getting all excited about for reasons I can't fathom. Dolby and DTS seem to claim exactly the same thing for these codecs - bit for bit reconstruction of the original soundtrack. AIUI, DTS MA has a higher max bit-rate with BD, but that is probably academic for two reasons. Firstly, the studio master probably doesn't use anything like that bit-rate either, and even if it did, there wouldn't be space for it on the disc. So in practice I'm pretty sure that DTHD & DTS MA soundtracks would be identical. Anyone know any better, or is this just emporer's clothes?

Nick

[Titus]

I have a question... Not sure if this on the same lines... But on all the new fox titles these are DTS-HD right? My system is running off the PS3 and a sony amp capable of LPCM but not DTS-HD would this be converted to run on LPCM by the amp or would it completly resort back down to DD?

Also I thought PCM was completly uncommpressed so i didnt think it would be possible to get a commpressed track that could compare to this yet people claim the DTS-HD does (If im reading correct) can someone explain this to me in laymans terms?

Cheers Tim

[quetzalcoatl]

Originally Posted by Titus

I have a question... Not sure if this on the same lines... But on all the new fox titles these are DTS-HD right? My system is running off the PS3 and a sony amp capable of LPCM but not DTS-HD would this be converted to run on LPCM by the amp or would it completly resort back down to DD?

Also I thought PCM was completly uncommpressed so i didnt think it would be possible to get a commpressed track that could compare to this yet people claim the DTS-HD does (If im reading correct) can someone explain this to me in laymans terms?

Cheers Tim

No the Fox tiles are DTS HD MA.
There are 2 versions of DTS HD, HR and MA. And MA has 4X the avail bitrate as HR. With DTS you have to be overly specific since there naming in already confuising enough.

[Titus]

So In comparison to Sonys LPCM which format has the higher bitrate capacity and again would the DTS formats resort to PCM on an amp not capable of its playback or would they resort to plain Dolby Digital?

[quetzalcoatl]

Originally Posted by Titus

So In comparison to Sonys LPCM which format has the higher bitrate capacity and again would the DTS formats resort to PCM on an amp not capable of its playback or would they resort to plain Dolby Digital?

If a track had DTS HD MA on it and you could not decode it according to the dts specs it revers to standard DTS. As to which format has higher bitrates in theory LCPM and DTS HD MA would be the same. Since LCPM should not compress the audio in anyway just send it. However since we donot have a player capable at this time of decoding MA and sending it LCPM via HDMI we really donot know. The first player I know of that will do this will be the Denon 3800. And then we add it can the speakers really detect the variants that are produced. And if they could then could the persons ears do it. So as you can see it will start to get very subjective.