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never realized how bad dolby digital 5.1 was till recently...

purbeast0

purbeast0

No Lifer
now that i have a nice surround setup, i never realized how much better dts is than dd in movies. like it's night and day and there are some movies that i simply will not watch in dd.

my buddy gave me a 1tb drive that has a buncha mkv rips on it, in various formats with various audio soundtracks.

i fired up iron man because i heard the sound in the opening scene was really good when the big explosion happens. holy crap it sounded SSSSOOOO dull and weak. i was wondering wtf was up then i realized it was a dd track.

are all dd tracks this bad? i've really only watched real blurays recently in my ht which all have dts and they all sound excellent.
 
It may not be DD but rather the container the video was wrapped in. I do agree with you though...DTS DOES sound better. That said, Ive listened to some very good DD tracks as well.
 
blackangst1 said:
It may not be DD but rather the container the video was wrapped in. I do agree with you though...DTS DOES sound better. That said, Ive listened to some very good DD tracks as well.
Click to expand...

agree with this

also beast, you get a measurement mic yet?
 
no mic yet. my laptop is out of commission and don't plan on getting one anytime soon. and my laptop was hackintosh anyways.
 
purbeast0 said:
now that i have a nice surround setup, i never realized how much better dts is than dd in movies. like it's night and day and there are some movies that i simply will not watch in dd.

my buddy gave me a 1tb drive that has a buncha mkv rips on it, in various formats with various audio soundtracks.

i fired up iron man because i heard the sound in the opening scene was really good when the big explosion happens. holy crap it sounded SSSSOOOO dull and weak. i was wondering wtf was up then i realized it was a dd track.

are all dd tracks this bad? i've really only watched real blurays recently in my ht which all have dts and they all sound excellent.
Click to expand...

no, it's not the codec, it's the people doing the encoding.
 
well that makes me feel better about dd not being as bad as i experienced. i just ran mediainfo on it and saw dd 5.1 and thought they all sounded that way.

i've been skeptical about buying some older movies due to it but now i think i will just get some of em. especially because i doubt the ninja turtles trilogy will be coming out in dts any time soon lol.
 
purbeast0 said:
well that makes me feel better about dd not being as bad as i experienced. i just ran mediainfo on it and saw dd 5.1 and thought they all sounded that way.

i've been skeptical about buying some older movies due to it but now i think i will just get some of em. especially because i doubt the ninja turtles trilogy will be coming out in dts any time soon lol.
Click to expand...

Here is the kicker, even on BRDs, the sound quality will vary.
 
sdifox said:
Here is the kicker, even on BRDs, the sound quality will vary.
Click to expand...

there is no way though that the iron man dd track i heard is the one on the bluray in the same quality. that had to be an encoding issue which makes sense now after reading about it in this thread.
 
purbeast0 said:
there is no way though that the iron man dd track i heard is the one on the bluray in the same quality. that had to be an encoding issue which makes sense now after reading about it in this thread.
Click to expand...

Just because BRD gives you superior formats doesn't guarantee superior result :biggrin:
 
I just have 2.0 stereo and very used to it, so I don't have to worry about hearing a comparison
 
Ironman has dynamic range compression enabled. Turn it off in your player or AVR and it should sound like the DTS track.
 
Two scenes I always used to show off 5.1 are in DD.
The bathroom fight scene in True Lies and the (i believe) opening scene in Cliffhanger where the helicopter comes into view.
Sounds awesome.
 
oldsmoboat said:
Two scenes I always used to show off 5.1 are in DD.
The bathroom fight scene in True Lies and the (i believe) opening scene in Cliffhanger where the helicopter comes into view.
Sounds awesome.
Click to expand...

i actually watched cliffhanger 2 weeks ago. for being an old movie that movie has a great soundtrack.
 
purbeast0 said:
now that i have a nice surround setup, i never realized how much better dts is than dd in movies. like it's night and day and there are some movies that i simply will not watch in dd.

my buddy gave me a 1tb drive that has a buncha mkv rips on it, in various formats with various audio soundtracks.

i fired up iron man because i heard the sound in the opening scene was really good when the big explosion happens. holy crap it sounded SSSSOOOO dull and weak. i was wondering wtf was up then i realized it was a dd track.

are all dd tracks this bad? i've really only watched real blurays recently in my ht which all have dts and they all sound excellent.
Click to expand...

You'll have to excuse me, but your terminology is really confusing. You're indicating that you've been watching Blu-Rays with "dts" recently. Now, to be clear, if you're encountering a DTS track on a Blu-Ray, then it's most likely a DTS HD Master lossless audio track. Typically, when you're viewing a MKV, it is recompressed to reduce the file size for both video and audio. The video is usually at a much lower bitrate, and the audio is encoded using a lossy format such as Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS Surround.

Keep in mind that Dolby does has a format that competes with DTS HD Master called Dolby TrueHD.

EDIT:

Oh, and cowabunga, dude! I own the Turtles trilogy on Blu-Ray, and it sounds fine to me. :$
 
Back in the day of DVDs, wasn't DTS encoded at a higher volume when compared to DD5.1, which accounted for some (not saying all) of the apparent differences?
 
Aikouka said:
You'll have to excuse me, but your terminology is really confusing. You're indicating that you've been watching Blu-Rays with "dts" recently. Now, to be clear, if you're encountering a DTS track on a Blu-Ray, then it's most likely a DTS HD Master lossless audio track. Typically, when you're viewing a MKV, it is recompressed to reduce the file size for both video and audio. The video is usually at a much lower bitrate, and the audio is encoded using a lossy format such as Dolby Digital 5.1 or DTS Surround.

Keep in mind that Dolby does has a format that competes with DTS HD Master called Dolby TrueHD.

EDIT:

Oh, and cowabunga, dude! I own the Turtles trilogy on Blu-Ray, and it sounds fine to me. :$
Click to expand...

yeah ill be the first to admit that i don't know anything about encoding, i was simply looking at the info given to me from media info to get the soundtrack.

and i ordered the turtles trilogy today and gonna watch some of it this weekend in the theater!
 
Max bitrates:
DD -- 640kpbs
DTS -- 1.5mbps

Spread out over 5.1 channels, the former is way below what we consider acceptable for lossy compression these days. 😉
 
s44 said:
Max bitrates:
DD -- 640kpbs
DTS -- 1.5mbps

Spread out over 5.1 channels, the former is way below what we consider acceptable for lossy compression these days. 😉
Click to expand...

You are making a big assumption there. You are assuming equal bit efficiency between the codecs.
 
s44 said:
Max bitrates:
DD -- 640kpbs
DTS -- 1.5mbps

Spread out over 5.1 channels, the former is way below what we consider acceptable for lossy compression these days. 😉
Click to expand...

H.264 Sony AVC maxes out at 54 Mb/s
H.262 MPEG 2 can encode as high as 80 Mb/s

Mpeg 2 is the clear choice.


Anyway, I've concluded on my own that DD @ 640 kbps and DTS at 1.5 mbps sound roughly the same, but there are so many variables here that you can't really make sense of what's what. Not all movies are mastered the same. Not even the same movies with two soundtracks, one in DD and one in DTS, will be mastered identically, so the only way to make an objective analysis to encode samples of audio yourself from wav's and do some ABX testing and find out. I'd be surprised if you could hear the differences, unless you've got a $10k+ audio system.

purbeast, the way you came to your conclusion is very flawed. If DTS *is* all that better than DD, you certainly wouldn't find out from mkv rips. Investigate a bunch of them and I bet they'll be 768 kbps DTS tracks too...and comparing a DD 640 kbps to a 768 DTS track and finding that you still prefer the DTS track should tip you off that your method is far from an objective analysis.
 
reallyscrued said:
H.264 Sony AVC maxes out at 54 Mb/s
H.262 MPEG 2 can encode as high as 80 Mb/s

Mpeg 2 is the clear choice.


Anyway, I've concluded on my own that DD @ 640 kbps and DTS at 1.5 mbps sound roughly the same, but there are so many variables here that you can't really make sense of what's what. Not all movies are mastered the same. Not even the same movies with two soundtracks, one in DD and one in DTS, will be mastered identically, so the only way to make an objective analysis to encode samples of audio yourself from wav's and do some ABX testing and find out. I'd be surprised if you could hear the differences, unless you've got a $10k+ audio system.

purbeast, the way you came to your conclusion is very flawed. If DTS *is* all that better than DD, you certainly wouldn't find out from mkv rips. Investigate a bunch of them and I bet they'll be 768 kbps DTS tracks too...and comparing a DD 640 kbps to a 768 DTS track and finding that you still prefer the DTS track should tip you off that your method is far from an objective analysis.
Click to expand...


I have a 10+k system. Other than the bass boost, I don't hear much diff either. SMR did a comparison based on a dvd-audio, using it as master since that is as close as consumers can get to master and he found the DD waveform to be much closer to the dvd-audio one, especially in the lower HZs.

Of course that was not a definitive test, but at least there was a third track that is lossless that DD and DTS were being compared to.
 
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