DTS Debate
Dear Gary: I just wanted to put in my two cents worth on the Dolby Digital vs. DTS Digital Surround “debate.” I use the term loosely, because I’m amazed at the ignorance of some readers who are writing in and criticizing your “promotion” of DTS. First of all, I haven’t heard even ONE reader say they’ve carefully level-matched and compared even ONE movie transferred in both Dolby Digital and DTS. This makes their claims spurious at best. The point of an excellent publication like yours is that you actually do your homework, and then actually listen to the recordings. This comes from a long-standing tradition among the audiophile community. My point is that if you want to criticize a book, you must first READ the book. If you want to criticize a film, you must first SEE the film. If you want to criticize the difference between two competing motion picture sound formats, then you must do a FIRST HAND LISTENING TEST to the film’s soundtrack on the rival formats, with the levels matched, in the same room, through the same equipment. You have addressed this issue in your magazine time and time again. I was fortunate enough to attend Hi-Fi ’98 in Los Angeles, and listen to an actual demonstration of Dolby Digital being encoded, live in person. They played a series of master recordings through a Tascam DA-88 (8-channel professional digital recorder) machine, and then encoded them in Dolby Digital. All the sound was routed through a professional mixer, so they were able to do before/after comparisons. Though the Dolby Digital encoding scheme works fairly well, when directly compared to the original master recordings, certain limitations were revealed. When the encoding began, I noticed a definite loss in spatial ambience, and overall resolution. The image got muddied up quite a bit compared to the master. Also, I noticed a slight drop in dynamic range. This is not to say that it sounded bad, only that it was NOTICEABLY degraded during the encoding process. Dolby Digital is NOT transparent. This is at the heart of the matter you have been addressing for the last several years. Widescreen Review is one of the few magazines that tell us all the pertinent information about the equipment/procedures used. I haven’t seen ONE other magazine tell how they come up with the aspect ratios on letterboxed movies, for example. (Other than the now defunct The Perfect Vision.) I think the reason your remarks are repeatedly challenged is the fact that the rest of the home theatre community does such a poor job of journalism that the readers are left with the impression that “all digital movie formats sound the same.” This is exactly the same problem that came about when CDs first hit the market, and the popular misconception was that “all CD players sounded the same.” We quickly found out how untrue that was. As you stated, the Dolby Digital codec does NOT simply pass through or clone the original bitstream. It compresses and reduces the amount of data that is fed through. On a separate note, I don’t have a problem with DTS’ attempts to get its codec adopted as the new multichannel music format as long as they provide an additional Red Book two-channel stereo, or 4:2:4 matrix mix for backwards compatibility with all existing CD players/stereos. This is the only drawback to their current music CDs. Keep up the good work. I’m looking forward to my DTS demo DVD. Any chance of getting us a Dolby Digital (or DTS) 5.1 demo DVD with the Star Wars: Episode One The Phantom Menace teaser trailer on it? It has a great mix. Hint, hint....
Stephen McMillan
Editor Gary Reber Comments:
It is certainly refreshing to hear from a reader who obviously is not tainted by misinformation and conducts his own level-matched listening tests comparing Dolby Digital to DTS Digital Surround. Thank you for your contribution to this issue. I don’t know how many critics of DTS have formed their opinions without conducting objective level-match listening tests. But who would have thought that the notion of “better” would have such detractors spreading misinformation and blaming DTS for simply existing?
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