DTS Vs. Dolby Digital
Dear Gary: DTS is an utter joke and a complete waste of money. In fact, after a six hour audition comparing DTS discs to Dolby Digital ones the conclusions are that in most cases the picture quality was POORER on the more expensive DTS discs, and the “less” compression which is supposed to be the case in the rear channels actually is an attenuation factor of about 6dB. In most cases, the rear channels on the DTS recordings sounded muddy, unclean, and quite honestly, untight. The rear channels may be louder but that is all that they are. DTS turned up the volume, but forgot to clean up the distortion. If you Dolby Digital people want DTS, turn up your volume knobs 6dB. Bamm!! There you go, you have got DTS. And actually a BETTER version of DTS because the Dolby separation and the final mastering process are leaps and bounds ahead of DTS. Hang em up DTS, you are too late, true videophiles aren’t stupid, we know who the real winner is here, Dolby Digital. Sorry DTS, you don’t cut it. Also, the real reason why Widescreen Review is DTS biased? Well, why the hell wouldn’t they be? The revenue generated from sales and ad dollars by pushing a new (not necessarily better) technology is insurmountable next to giving honest opinions. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Come on Widescreen Review, smarten up a little will ya?
Geordy Duncan
Equipment Review Editor Shane Buettner Comments:
Much of what I see in your letter to us is opinion that has very little discernible substance as you name no specific titles, tell us nothing about your playback system or the comparative techniques from which your conclusions are derived. Our properly calibrated playback systems are documented in the magazine, and we’ve done level-matched Dolby® Digital/DTS® Digital Surround™ comparisons of every DVD title released in both formats and we honestly can’t say we’ve seen the loss in picture quality that you claim. Our Picture Quality Review Editor, Suzanne Hodges has the benefit of reviewing DVD picture quality on a high resolution state-of-the-art videophile-quality system with a 9-inch CRT front projector and she hasn’t noted inferior picture quality in any of her picture reviews of DTS titles. Similarly, we’ve never noticed a 6dB increase in surround channel level on DTS soundtracks, which quite frankly would be noticeable enough that a hearing impaired person would be certain to notice. That would knock you out of your chair! Again, you mention no specific titles, preventing me from making any more useful comment other than to suggest that perhaps part of the problems you’re noticing may lie in your playback system being miscalibrated or the use of flawed comparison procedures. I wonder, for instance, if your comparisons took into account Dolby Digital’s dialog normalization offset, which in many cases would result in the DTS tracks overall volume level playing back 4dB higher than a Dolby Digital track if no action was taken to compensate for this feature of Dolby Digital. At WSR we make sure to level match these soundtracks for every comparison performed. I would also add that DTS titles are no longer “more expensive” and that they are coming to market now at the same price with the same features as the Dolby Digital releases, and many even have Dolby Digital 5.1 on the same disc. Unfortunate marketing decisions resulted in the first wave of DTS titles hitting the market with fewer or even no features at higher prices than the Dolby Digital versions, but that’s been rectified for some time now. As for the other performance faults you find with the surround channels on DTS soundtracks, I can’t say that our findings are anywhere in line with your own. Movie Sound Editor Perry Sun and Editor Gary Reber often find DTS’ performance superior to Dolby Digital, with DTS offering superior low level detail and channel separation. Given the large differences in bit pool size for the two codecs, your findings are hard to reconcile in that respect and are so different from our own, we suggest again that you should take a serious look at your playback system. I’m also curious about your statement regarding the Dolby “mastering process” being superior to DTS’. From what we’ve been able to gather from talking with people involved in post production, the mastering and preparation techniques used are the same for both formats, with the exception that DTS soundtracks are often sourced from higher resolution masters. Again you don’t name titles, but I’m personally aware of quite a few DTS soundtracks that are mastered from superior 20- and 24-bit masters while the Dolby Digital counterparts are mastered at inferior 16-bit depth (The Haunting, Antz, Mouse Hunt, and Peacemaker are a few that come to mind off the top of my head.) I’d also add that I’m not pointing the finger at Dolby here, as they generally don’t perform the encoding or mastering themselves, it’s the content providers who are using inferior masters. DTS has done a lot of their own encoding and go through the extra step to obtain masters of higher quality at 20- or 24-bit depth whenever possible. I’m just wondering how and by whom you were misinformed on this subject. As far as WSR’s alleged “bias” is concerned, we’re always biased toward superior sound quality.
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