Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners QS8's are up!

You got it Ray. Just go into the DVD menu; look for "Audio," "Setup," "Language," or combinations thereof; select DTS (if available); and that's it. I'm always surprised to find audio choices in a menu entitled "Language." They hide the audio setup in some strange menus sometimes.

I don't know how your Denon works, but my Onkyo has a selectable display, and one of the selections shows the audio format that is playing. I use that one regularly, so it confirms that I'm hearing DD, or DTS, or stereo, or PLII, or whatever.

Ray,

It's a noticeable difference.

Hi Ray3,

Cable modem problems kept me out of circulation for a day or so.
Dolby Digital and dts are both "lossy" data-compression systems that use perceptual encoding algorithms to reduce the amount of storage space needed for 5.1 or more discrete channels of sound on a DVD or movie film in a cinema.

If all six channels ran at the same data rate as a 2-channel CD, there wouldn't be enough space for all the data and high-quality video on a DVD (or movie in a cinema).

dts runs at a higher data rate than Dolby Digital, but it still throws away tons of data. I've participated in several professional comparisons of the two systems using the same soundtrack, and they were essentially indistinguishable.

However, it's my opinion that when dts masters a soundtrack there are slight "tweaks" in tonal balance and EQ to make it sound different from a Dolby Digital track, although dts denies this and claims that because of its higher data rate, dts is intrinsically more "revealing." Both systems run at a fraction of the data rate of a 2-channel PCM data stream from a CD.

An engineer at Axiom disagrees with me and we're going to continue this discussion over a beer. . .

Stay tuned.

Regards,

Thanks Alan. I think what I'm hearing here is that a blind A/B test might not reveal much of a difference and that you wouldn't want to bet the farm on the extra audio DTS provides.

Said another way, if I flip on the DTS switch it wouldn't hurt, but it probably doesn't matter much if I listen to DD 5.1 instead.

For what's it worth, I agree with Alan. To my very
"bias" ears, watching a DVD in DD seem to be much
more "enveloping" then DTS. But yes, DTS can sound
crisper. Try an IMAX movie. You'll see. :-)

In reply to:

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An engineer at Axiom disagrees with me and we're going to continue this discussion over a beer. . .

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Hmm... so all I have to do to get out for a beer is disagree with you?

Again, to my ears (without running a trojan to capture bitstream data for comparison between the two)... DTS' compression seems to be psychoacoustically better at the same (or nominally the same) bitrate as Dolby Digital's. Much in the same way you can compress a PCM stereo audio track with u-Law encoding and with MPEG Layer 3 and get a file roughly the same size, but the MP3 will sound better. I'm not so sure this battle is that cut and dried as just how MUCH information is thrown away, but has more to do with WHAT is thrown away.

Of course, I could be talking out my as... er, hat - and DTS might just play some delay and phase games that make it sound the way it does.

Bren R.