Mar
20
Dolby Digital or DTS?
Filed Under Surround Sound
One of the age old arguments in home theater has to be Dolby Digital versus DTS for surround sound. You’ll hear a wide range of reasons why one may be better than the other or why one might be better than the other, but it’s really much simpler than might’s and maybes. This is a case of the “bigger” technology not necessarily being the better technology.
Even though Dolby Digital processing is more familiar to the consumer at large, it’s actually DTS that holds the slight (depending on how you look at things) edge in overall sound quality. DTS uses less compression, roughly 1,536,000 bits per second versus Dolby Digitals 448,000 bits per second. Yes you’ll hear some say “but Dolby Digital has a more efficient encoding scheme, it doesn’t need as many bits to deliver the same quality of sound” or something along those lines. Simply put, it just doesn’t pan out that way in the real world,
More bits is more bits, efficiency is great but the data transfer rate can bottleneck performance just as fast as a low-bit encode. Now none of this is meant to paint Dolby Digital in a poor light, it’s a great codec and one that’s served us well, it and DTS however are bettered by PCM, TrueHD, DTS-HD and DTS-HD Master audio. So while this may be of interest to those of you with huge DVD collections, know that sun is already (albeit slowly) setting on both Dolby Digital and standard DTS in terms of overall performance.
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