The idea behind Auro3D is to just use a lot of discrete channels, which is great for cinemas with a static playback architecture, but there's no way to adjust the mixing based on the listener's speaker setup. So it is difficult to make sound great for home use unless you have lots of space to hang things on your ceiling. (5 top speakers needed)
MPEG-H can do everything but it's difficult to configure and was fully specified very late, after Dolby Atmos was already in production. That said, this is the agreed-upon default standard for broadcast, because it supports stuff like 200 language-independent 3D objects + 5 language-dependent voice actor tracks, all positioned in 3D. MPEG-H can also be converted easily to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.
Many professionals agree that DTS:X is the best quality consumer option. It also theoretically supports quite a lot of customization. But ASIC implementations tend to freeze those because otherwise it's too expensive. And it still is expensive.
Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters with delay modules in between. That means it's by far the lowest-tech solution on the list. And that means cheap ASIC implementations. I believe this is why Atmos won.
If I remember correctly, DTS:X is a $4 chip, Atmos is a $0.5 chip.
Is there any example of a technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one? (In media recording and replay, at least).
This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.
And yet they get away with highway murder at the prices they charge to "experience" Atmos. Everything in this world is a rip off isn't it. Thanks for this background, it is fascinating.
On a side note: I have always like how the traditional DTS tracks sounded compared to Dolby, I always thought it was just me being weird but maybe there is something to it.
Just out of curiosity: Is there some way for consumers to "open" a Atmos soundtrack and see what speakers are outputting sound? I remember seeing some tool that visualizes the speakers as the soundtrack is playing. Is it also possible to edit this and re-compile it back into a finished atmos soundtrack?
I ask because I have this 2010s film that was "re-released" in atmos that has a missing sound effect in a specific scene and despite my attempts to reach out to the studio and director, I cannot seem to get ahold of them. My next thing would be to try and re-add the sound effect back into the atmos soundtrack. Is this possible?
If I recall rightly, this is why VHS beat out the higher quality Betamax back in the day of video tapes - it was cheaper to produce using VHS so everything was on VHS. Because everything was on VHS, that was what people bought and the higher quality Betamax lost enough market to survive.
It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.
It is somewhat amusing to me that an object based surround sound system has now become dominate after it was so big on PCs with Soundblaster and the A3D cards and was killed by 5.1 and a change in Windows DirectX to stop object based sound from being possible. Sound has really taken a big innovation step back and still isn't at the stage it was 20 years ago, most games nowadays have to use middleware to give environmental sound effects to play out of the 5.1/7.1/headphones that Windows provides, and then we have the special support for Dolby Atmos which competes poorly with the current good solutions on PC.
With games DTS:X for headphones sounded a lot better than Dolby Atmos for headphones but neither compares well to the latest Soundblaster AE and Sennheiser GSX. Alas binaural and environmental sound is very much a tertiary concern for a lot of gamers so its never recovered from the Windows Vista fatal blow.
Now we have the worst sounding solution developed for home theatrees that solves none of the PC gaming issues and doesn't even really do a good job with Movies either on its way to complete dominance. Its quite disappointing how the sound market has played out after all the work done by AMD for raytraced sound reflections and the early hardware implementations that did a similar thing alongside environmental effects and binaural directional sound including the vertical.
In my opinion, the WWISE 3D audio support is top notch. And you can even license my headphone virtualization as a plugin which - of course I'm biased - sounds awesome!
It's just that nowadays, less and less people play with sound at all. Mobile games? Sound doesn't matter. Switch? Sound matters very little. Xbox/PS5? 99% chance you'll use stereo TV speakers anyway.
So the remaining 0.1% of us who have a surround setup connected to a gaming PC have been optimized out of the market. There just isn't enough ROI for gaming companies to spend resources at pleasing 1 out of 1000 players with 3D sound.
The surround sound and HRTF on the PlayStation 5 exceeds my expectations. On the famous tech conference, they talked about calibrating the sound space relative your ears to get the best possible surround feel, but that's yet to come.
Growing up with the DJ/Rave experience, after being primarily interested in MUSIC, not HOME THEATER, I basically have a stereo bias and have no interest in surround-sound formats or multichannel (beyond 2) playback.
I realize that this comment serves no purpose in this discussion, other than as a point of reference for a steady community that has never gone away: that which uses hi-fi playback for stereo music. The soundfield is immersive enough with stereo, and as sound has an inherent latency somewhere around 3ms/meter in 20 degree C air, I find that any large surround-sound setups are incapable of cleanly reproducing events like beats. Dialogue gets blurred, etc.
This is my position as well. I've probably had every combination of surround sound setups imaginable, but nothing beats a really good 2/2.1 setup to my ears.
My takeaway has been that if 2 channels sounds crappy, you need to look at the room, not adding more damn speakers. It's just like shiny cloud tech imo.
For me, even stereo adds very little over mono when it comes to music. For movies 5.1 seems quite sufficient. As for gaming, every tiny improvement they can make is something I'd be interested in.
I'm using a 2.1 system so this shouldn't affect me, but sadly it does. Lately, even very expensive TV's lack DTS codecs, so playing movies from a DLNA server is not viable anymore, unless you re-encode every audio track. I understand the reasoning, they do not have to care about playing ripped movies on their devices, but I think the $2000 price tag could probably include the DTS license.
Multichannel audio when you try to use official means is so awful that it makes me laugh. It's like they don't want you using it considering the amount of hoops you have to hop through.
From personal experience you might encounter how:
* Your PC is not "certified"
* You haven't installed some (potentially paid) extension
* You have the extension but it isn't picked up by the streaming service
* Your streaming service doesn't support your OS
* Your media player can't do passtrough
* Your media player can do passtrough but nothing else on your system can (e.g. games)
* Your soundcard manufacturer didn't pay for the license to allow the previous point (and your OS's audio stack is too legacy to hack it in)
* Your media player can't downmix properly
* The cable you have is incompatible
* The cable you have is too compatible (causing the wrong output to be picked automatically)
* Your GPU drivers are wrong
* The default sampling rate of your sound card causes occasional crackling
* Your TV can't proxy audio from some inputs to external speakers
* Your TV doesn't recognize some formats from some inputs
* Your TV can't downmix
I *wish* I were kidding, it really is that bad.
In the end you pirate your content and output analog 5.1 straight to the speakers, it's cheaper, easier and significantly more reliable.
It's generally a mess. I have my TV connected to home cinema system via ARC and I need to manually change a setting in the TV to make it output the right format.
The infuriating thing is that the TV _knows_ what format it's dealing with and what it can handle, because when it's showing DTS content and is set to Dolby mode the 'Dolby' is greyed out in the options but DTS is available, and vice versa.
Like with many things in my lifetime I think perfection was achieved in this area at least a couple of decades ago. As the article states, nobody actually cared whether a DVD had Dolby or DTS on it. There was this perception that DTS must have been higher quality, so you'd imagine it was (and often the DTS version sounded louder due to calibration issues).
Our relentless insistence on progression has led to gimmicks like Dolby Atmos. It really doesn't add much of value to anything. It's just a new logo to put on cheap plastic soundbars that will be in landfills in a decade.
When you watch movies from the early days of Dolby Digital in the 80s you can tell that progress has been made since then. But watch a movie from the early 2000s and it will sound just like one today. In fact, they often sound better. Examples are Lord of the Rings, Spider-man 2 and War of the Worlds.
I worked in the Cinema industry when Dolby Atmos were introduced. It was a pretty big upgrade and quality assurance for each auditorium were strict. Speakers had to be installed all over the roof and more speakers had to be added all around the auditorium. So in a Cinema Atmos can be pretty great, but how you can translate this to a home theatre setting is beyond me.
“The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray connected to the TV with the audio passed through the ARC/eARC. However the vast majority of TV companies do not support this on the ARC/eARC.”
What about people who watch movies that they have downloaded (or ripped from a DVD/Blu-Ray) directly on the TV? I suppose that would produce whatever audio format the DVD had without the need of ARC/eARC, right?
Great article, but that was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had on mobile reading an article. Page kept sporadically reloading and jumping back to the top. Seemingly if I scrolled down in the wrong manner or clicked something it would trigger a reload or jump to the top. What a dumpster fire of a website.
I had DTS and Dolby receievers for about 15 years and no longer do, so I guess for me some of it just doesn't matter. We did surround with DVD + Blu-Ray for a while and then kind of stopped caring about it.
The thing I miss the most was I had a few DTS CDs that were amazing for surround sound music experience. I have yet to hear anything out of Apple's Spatial Audio that comes anywhere close to what those DTS CDs sounded like.
But DTS CDs were so ridiculously rare it was pointless.. I only had 2. I have a DTS surround copy of "What's New" by Dave Brubeck and I had a DTS surround recording of Holst's "The Planets". And I only ever had one CD player that could decode them. The DTS receivers required a DTS aware CD player to decode it and send a DTS stream. They couldn't take a raw bitstream and figure out it was DTS.
I was on the bus this week, listening to a podcast on my AirPods Pro in “transparent” mode. I switched to some music and flipped to noise canceling mode. I’d forgotten all about turning on spacial audio, but I’ve gotta say, it was magical. The entire world went silent, except for the music coming from my phone I was holding in front of me. Even when I turned my head, the sound was coming from the phone. I had to convince myself that I wasn’t being “that guy” and listening to music on speakers in public. The only giveaway was that the sound quality was too good for that.
I’m won over. The listening experience was astonishingly good. IMO it’s not a replacement for a good surround setup in your own living room, can be mind blowing when out and about.
This whole discussion here is somewhat weird because everyone keeps thinking about shitty soundbars and headphones. Dolby Atmos and DTS:X on a home cinema system with decent and large speakers is amazing and noticably different than simple non-object based surround systems
That is honestly the problem with “home theater”. You have to have just the right space for them.
Gotta have the TV in the right space.
Gotta have the right room shape to accommodate read speakers.
With atoms you have to even have space for those “upper” speakers.
It’s rare to have a room in a house that not has the right floor plan for such installs. If your TV goes anywhere but exactly one place it becomes very hard to install “correctly”.
Somehow we’ve managed 5.1 in our apartment. I’ve seen a 6.1 properly set up. But most of the time I see fancy receivers pumping out 2.1 because their room simply doesn’t have accommodations for properly placed rear speakers.
I dunno. I guess my point is that most people really don’t have the floor plan for a 5.1 setup. And for those that do, many simply have no desire to set it up.
I assumed there was a good speaker setup connected to the tv in my roommates' house when I lived there. Turned out to just be a soundbar, maybe a sub too. People rail against these things but they seem great for being so compact to me.
> I realised there was no DTS support listed for the Panorama 3. ...
> “The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray
It's kind of ironic, that after years of Sonos users asking the company "Where's the DTS on our expensive soundbars? Come on, this is an expensive set of allegedly smart kit, why aren't you doing it?", Sonos very recently released support.
"'Most seem to theorise that it’s this dedication to quality, resulting in file size or high bandwidth requirements that makes [DTS] far less suitable for the low-bandwidth streaming world of highly compressed and efficient audio delivery required by all streaming services.'"
And there's the meat of it. Streaming has been a near inevitability and it seems DTS is >5 years too late to be thinking about bandwidth requirements.
> The only real difference is that the aspect ratio of the film may change during some specific ‘Enhanced’ sections. To my mind that’s a mockery of being “as the director intended”; one must surely doubt that a director would choose to switch ratios mid-movie (unless part of the film design, a la Oliver Stone, say, or the extraordinary genre-busting Spiderman into the Spiderverse).
It is not unheard of for newer films to have specific scenes that were shot in IMAX (and for those scenes to change aspect ratio accordingly when presented in an IMAX theater). One of the first search results on the topic:
On a tangent, wondering "but what about thx?": TIL that THX is orthogonal to the compression/transport format and is about measuring and adjusting the movie theatre audio to better and "well enough" match the recording studio characteristics.
DTS needs to work that Sony relationship and convince them to convert their surround format to DTS:X. Maybe even allow it for free just to keep their format alive.
The current PS5 3D-audio solution is good only for headphones. They have a "virtual" height option for stereo speakers, but it released to terrible reviews. No 7.1 virtual height speakers, though that's also supposedly in the works. I'm not optimistic it will be any better. Those who invest in good audio setups don't want it either way.
Give us proper 3D audio Sony, this is something Microsoft has had since 2017.
I’m still stuck with a 5.1 system at the moment. But no matter because streaming sucks ass. It makes no difference if it’s Dolby or DTS: streaming “Atmos” is on top of shitty compressed DD++. If I like a movie enough I’ll get it on Blu-ray. Some them have 18Mbit just for audio. If I had the cash I’d get Kaliedescape.
I have to say, Dolby Atmos in a certified theater, with a good seating position, is quite fantastic. Not sure you would get the same effect at home without a 64 speaker array and proper room treatment... but hey
I am not in these markets and certainly don't understand the finer details, or major ones like "Xperi needs X license purchases to survive as a company", so I'm putting this out there at that level -- please correct me where I'm being naive, if you feel the need[0]. :)
There's always been a pretty solid few "categories" of products in this space. There's my Mom and Dad, who purchased a sound bar for the place up north because the TV speakers were terrible and the room acoustics were so bad you couldn't understand anything said[1] and it does rain up there, sometimes. There's "I want reasonable surround sound" guys who buy higher-end sound bars/lower end all-in-one 5.1 set ups. There's the guys like me who went through the trouble of setting up the room, perfectly, and purchased a mid-range AVR, solid TV, and higher-end speakers[2], and the "Reference Folks" -- all premium, high-end, obsess about aspects beyond the speakers/devices/cables to "wall coatings, double dry-wall, sound insulation, etc, etc."
There's several categories in-between those, but everyone above me absolutely cares about having that track and will pay extra for it. Depending on the set up, it wasn't (probably still isn't at some level) uncommon for folks like this to have a separate component for decoding specific audio tracks sending the decoded result of each channel separately to the amp, which did nothing but what it's name suggests. There's a world where DTS can continue to exist for these folks. They're still consumers of Blu-Ray discs, or have Plex servers with uncompressed versions of things, for the same reasons -- streaming service audio and video isn't as good. It sounds like they were already trying to position themselves as "the higher-end", which was a far better value proposition before streaming platforms took over, now that market is much more niche.
I, similarly, didn't know about streaming platforms not supporting DTS. Frankly, since having kids, I pay a lot less attention to that space. I'm surprised the benefits of delivering the DTS (reasonably compressed, but DVD quality) track don't outweigh the extra size. These aren't small files and video is most of it, but I'd take a small hit there for some movies in my collection to hear the DTS audio. Adding to the file size a bit is certainly something I'd like to see; I'd probably pay a buck more a month for it if a "Premium Streaming" option were available -- well, I would have in the past. I guess the issue they face is that there's nothing particularly special about the DTS sound track these days[3]. Is there no technical benefit between DTS:X and Dolby Atmos? I sounds like DTS supports more speakers.
Outside of streaming video, does it matter for gaming? It seems like if my console could output a DTS:X signal to my AVR, assuming my AVR supported it, I could setup 32 speakers (and pretend I could tell the difference between that and, say, 9), but I'm know there's people who would care if that exists. I know my Xbox S can output some compressed formats to my AVR, I'm not sure if DTS:X is among them, but there are those who would pay for that ability, delivered by software (if MS isn't doing that already).
So, not taking into account whether or not Xperi could survive the smaller -- high-end only -- market or not (it's a pretty big space), having support for a better audio codec for just the uses of "discs/Plex" and non-video is going to rank higher than most of the trivialities I've seen hundreds dropped on by people in the high-end home theater/audio space[4]. Maybe that means cranking up the licensing fees, and my category of owner no longer has the next generation's DTS creation available to it. It also probably matters a lot less to me in that category because the sound quality of the DD:Atmos tracks that I've heard have all been on the great side. Once it passes a certain threshold, people in my category don't care about it -- our other equipment probably doesn't support some of the things DTS:X provides that DD:Atmos doesn't (my AVR handles 9.1 speakers in various configurations, max).
[0] Kindly, preferably, I won't hold you to it.
[1] It amplified deep all the way through mid-range, but just below an average woman's voice, so if soundtrack sounds, noise/effects, or a man's voice would be 10-20% louder than a woman's. We needed some dampening panels but it's a lake house, main floor -- all windows except for the one spot it makes sense to put a TV.
[2] Or even "purchased speakers they had to buy one by one, separately", since most of the companies requiring you to do that at least partly because it's hard to sell integrated 7.1/5.1 sets in the $3,000+ range.
[3] Maybe there never was, but the DTS tracks on some movies have bullets that fly through me whereas the DD tracks they wouldn't leave the center speaker. I've heard many, perfect DD tracks, but among my collection I have several examples where the DTS track sounds perfect and the DD track sounds like up-mixed stereo, and a small handful where the DD track is great ... provided you don't listen to the DTS track, where everything is just a little wider, particularly in the back, and it makes everything kind of "line up" better -- a guy runs past the camera and the footsteps come from behind just to the right, whereas the character goes through you on the DD side. It also seemed as though the DTS tracks engage the LFE parts. I have an old-school piston ButtKicker under my couch, we feel that, and when that part is off, it wrecks the experience of some movies for us (my favorite being sending some of the notes from a sound-track's bass guitar into LFE where it over-powers everything else going on). I have only anecdata, I'll admit, though.
[4] I'm just jealous -- very happy with the sound of my own system, but I know a few people who obsess and spend a lot of money, constantly tweaking/upgrading their Home Theater space and when you hear the same movie played on their perfect system, you come home and it briefly makes your system sound like the speakers are empty soup cans connected by rope to the receiver.
As mentioned in another comment, Windows Sonic is the default spatial implementation provided with Windows by default. There are also paid Dolby Atmos and DTS plugins available through the Microsoft Store where licenses may be included dependent on your hardware or OEM, e.g. my Logitech Gaming Pro X includes a license for the DTS plugin.
Personally I do like the Dolby Atmos plugin, I have my computer connected to a TV with sound passed via eARC to my soundbar. However, if you're consuming Film/TV with such a setup, you probably just want to enable Dolby/DTS passthrough instead.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|3 years ago|reply
I used to work in this space and I've dealt with:
- Barco Auro 3D
- Frauenhofer MPEG-H
- Dolby Atoms
- DTS:X
The idea behind Auro3D is to just use a lot of discrete channels, which is great for cinemas with a static playback architecture, but there's no way to adjust the mixing based on the listener's speaker setup. So it is difficult to make sound great for home use unless you have lots of space to hang things on your ceiling. (5 top speakers needed)
MPEG-H can do everything but it's difficult to configure and was fully specified very late, after Dolby Atmos was already in production. That said, this is the agreed-upon default standard for broadcast, because it supports stuff like 200 language-independent 3D objects + 5 language-dependent voice actor tracks, all positioned in 3D. MPEG-H can also be converted easily to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.
Many professionals agree that DTS:X is the best quality consumer option. It also theoretically supports quite a lot of customization. But ASIC implementations tend to freeze those because otherwise it's too expensive. And it still is expensive.
Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters with delay modules in between. That means it's by far the lowest-tech solution on the list. And that means cheap ASIC implementations. I believe this is why Atmos won.
If I remember correctly, DTS:X is a $4 chip, Atmos is a $0.5 chip.
[+] [-] p0larboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambataa|3 years ago|reply
This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.
[+] [-] CamperBob2|3 years ago|reply
FIR, right? That's crazy long for an IIR filter.
[+] [-] snthd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nebula8804|3 years ago|reply
On a side note: I have always like how the traditional DTS tracks sounded compared to Dolby, I always thought it was just me being weird but maybe there is something to it.
[+] [-] nebula8804|3 years ago|reply
I ask because I have this 2010s film that was "re-released" in atmos that has a missing sound effect in a specific scene and despite my attempts to reach out to the studio and director, I cannot seem to get ahold of them. My next thing would be to try and re-add the sound effect back into the atmos soundtrack. Is this possible?
[+] [-] balabaster|3 years ago|reply
It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.
[+] [-] PaulKeeble|3 years ago|reply
With games DTS:X for headphones sounded a lot better than Dolby Atmos for headphones but neither compares well to the latest Soundblaster AE and Sennheiser GSX. Alas binaural and environmental sound is very much a tertiary concern for a lot of gamers so its never recovered from the Windows Vista fatal blow.
Now we have the worst sounding solution developed for home theatrees that solves none of the PC gaming issues and doesn't even really do a good job with Movies either on its way to complete dominance. Its quite disappointing how the sound market has played out after all the work done by AMD for raytraced sound reflections and the early hardware implementations that did a similar thing alongside environmental effects and binaural directional sound including the vertical.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|3 years ago|reply
It's just that nowadays, less and less people play with sound at all. Mobile games? Sound doesn't matter. Switch? Sound matters very little. Xbox/PS5? 99% chance you'll use stereo TV speakers anyway.
So the remaining 0.1% of us who have a surround setup connected to a gaming PC have been optimized out of the market. There just isn't enough ROI for gaming companies to spend resources at pleasing 1 out of 1000 players with 3D sound.
[+] [-] sp332|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bancakes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] urn_piqoq|3 years ago|reply
I realize that this comment serves no purpose in this discussion, other than as a point of reference for a steady community that has never gone away: that which uses hi-fi playback for stereo music. The soundfield is immersive enough with stereo, and as sound has an inherent latency somewhere around 3ms/meter in 20 degree C air, I find that any large surround-sound setups are incapable of cleanly reproducing events like beats. Dialogue gets blurred, etc.
[+] [-] bob1029|3 years ago|reply
My takeaway has been that if 2 channels sounds crappy, you need to look at the room, not adding more damn speakers. It's just like shiny cloud tech imo.
[+] [-] im3w1l|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flacebo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avamander|3 years ago|reply
From personal experience you might encounter how:
* Your PC is not "certified"
* You haven't installed some (potentially paid) extension
* You have the extension but it isn't picked up by the streaming service
* Your streaming service doesn't support your OS
* Your media player can't do passtrough
* Your media player can do passtrough but nothing else on your system can (e.g. games)
* Your soundcard manufacturer didn't pay for the license to allow the previous point (and your OS's audio stack is too legacy to hack it in)
* Your media player can't downmix properly
* The cable you have is incompatible
* The cable you have is too compatible (causing the wrong output to be picked automatically)
* Your GPU drivers are wrong
* The default sampling rate of your sound card causes occasional crackling
* Your TV can't proxy audio from some inputs to external speakers
* Your TV doesn't recognize some formats from some inputs
* Your TV can't downmix
I *wish* I were kidding, it really is that bad.
In the end you pirate your content and output analog 5.1 straight to the speakers, it's cheaper, easier and significantly more reliable.
[+] [-] petepete|3 years ago|reply
The infuriating thing is that the TV _knows_ what format it's dealing with and what it can handle, because when it's showing DTS content and is set to Dolby mode the 'Dolby' is greyed out in the options but DTS is available, and vice versa.
[+] [-] pier25|3 years ago|reply
You best bet is buying a dedicated HT receiver and plugging your video sources into it (ATV, Nvidia, BluRay, etc).
It's worth noting the ATV does not have HDMI audio passthrough and the latest version has a ton of issues with Atmos:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253553714
https://www.martinloganowners.com/threads/2021-new-gen-apple...
[+] [-] recursive|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] globular-toast|3 years ago|reply
Our relentless insistence on progression has led to gimmicks like Dolby Atmos. It really doesn't add much of value to anything. It's just a new logo to put on cheap plastic soundbars that will be in landfills in a decade.
When you watch movies from the early days of Dolby Digital in the 80s you can tell that progress has been made since then. But watch a movie from the early 2000s and it will sound just like one today. In fact, they often sound better. Examples are Lord of the Rings, Spider-man 2 and War of the Worlds.
Why can't we just be happy?
[+] [-] Thlom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Al-Khwarizmi|3 years ago|reply
What about people who watch movies that they have downloaded (or ripped from a DVD/Blu-Ray) directly on the TV? I suppose that would produce whatever audio format the DVD had without the need of ARC/eARC, right?
[+] [-] gwbas1c|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] indigodaddy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ben7799|3 years ago|reply
The thing I miss the most was I had a few DTS CDs that were amazing for surround sound music experience. I have yet to hear anything out of Apple's Spatial Audio that comes anywhere close to what those DTS CDs sounded like.
But DTS CDs were so ridiculously rare it was pointless.. I only had 2. I have a DTS surround copy of "What's New" by Dave Brubeck and I had a DTS surround recording of Holst's "The Planets". And I only ever had one CD player that could decode them. The DTS receivers required a DTS aware CD player to decode it and send a DTS stream. They couldn't take a raw bitstream and figure out it was DTS.
[+] [-] kstrauser|3 years ago|reply
I’m won over. The listening experience was astonishingly good. IMO it’s not a replacement for a good surround setup in your own living room, can be mind blowing when out and about.
[+] [-] gwbas1c|3 years ago|reply
I also believe ffmpeg will convert them to a proper 5.1 flac/wav.
[+] [-] dtx1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spookthesunset|3 years ago|reply
Gotta have the TV in the right space.
Gotta have the right room shape to accommodate read speakers.
With atoms you have to even have space for those “upper” speakers.
It’s rare to have a room in a house that not has the right floor plan for such installs. If your TV goes anywhere but exactly one place it becomes very hard to install “correctly”.
Somehow we’ve managed 5.1 in our apartment. I’ve seen a 6.1 properly set up. But most of the time I see fancy receivers pumping out 2.1 because their room simply doesn’t have accommodations for properly placed rear speakers.
I dunno. I guess my point is that most people really don’t have the floor plan for a 5.1 setup. And for those that do, many simply have no desire to set it up.
It’s still cool though!
[+] [-] jimmaswell|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k8sToGo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Nursie|3 years ago|reply
> “The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray
It's kind of ironic, that after years of Sonos users asking the company "Where's the DTS on our expensive soundbars? Come on, this is an expensive set of allegedly smart kit, why aren't you doing it?", Sonos very recently released support.
Right when it's on the decline.
[+] [-] Sporktacular|3 years ago|reply
And there's the meat of it. Streaming has been a near inevitability and it seems DTS is >5 years too late to be thinking about bandwidth requirements.
[+] [-] pinebox|3 years ago|reply
It is not unheard of for newer films to have specific scenes that were shot in IMAX (and for those scenes to change aspect ratio accordingly when presented in an IMAX theater). One of the first search results on the topic:
https://www.avforums.com/threads/aspect-ratio-changing-durin...
Wikipedia goes more in depth on specific films and the amount of IMAX time in each:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#Feature_films
As shooting in IMAX is expensive and difficult, we can presume this to be the director's intent.
[+] [-] hotpotamus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] froh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] debug-desperado|3 years ago|reply
The current PS5 3D-audio solution is good only for headphones. They have a "virtual" height option for stereo speakers, but it released to terrible reviews. No 7.1 virtual height speakers, though that's also supposedly in the works. I'm not optimistic it will be any better. Those who invest in good audio setups don't want it either way.
Give us proper 3D audio Sony, this is something Microsoft has had since 2017.
[+] [-] lowbloodsugar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exabrial|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XorNot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdip|3 years ago|reply
There's always been a pretty solid few "categories" of products in this space. There's my Mom and Dad, who purchased a sound bar for the place up north because the TV speakers were terrible and the room acoustics were so bad you couldn't understand anything said[1] and it does rain up there, sometimes. There's "I want reasonable surround sound" guys who buy higher-end sound bars/lower end all-in-one 5.1 set ups. There's the guys like me who went through the trouble of setting up the room, perfectly, and purchased a mid-range AVR, solid TV, and higher-end speakers[2], and the "Reference Folks" -- all premium, high-end, obsess about aspects beyond the speakers/devices/cables to "wall coatings, double dry-wall, sound insulation, etc, etc."
There's several categories in-between those, but everyone above me absolutely cares about having that track and will pay extra for it. Depending on the set up, it wasn't (probably still isn't at some level) uncommon for folks like this to have a separate component for decoding specific audio tracks sending the decoded result of each channel separately to the amp, which did nothing but what it's name suggests. There's a world where DTS can continue to exist for these folks. They're still consumers of Blu-Ray discs, or have Plex servers with uncompressed versions of things, for the same reasons -- streaming service audio and video isn't as good. It sounds like they were already trying to position themselves as "the higher-end", which was a far better value proposition before streaming platforms took over, now that market is much more niche.
I, similarly, didn't know about streaming platforms not supporting DTS. Frankly, since having kids, I pay a lot less attention to that space. I'm surprised the benefits of delivering the DTS (reasonably compressed, but DVD quality) track don't outweigh the extra size. These aren't small files and video is most of it, but I'd take a small hit there for some movies in my collection to hear the DTS audio. Adding to the file size a bit is certainly something I'd like to see; I'd probably pay a buck more a month for it if a "Premium Streaming" option were available -- well, I would have in the past. I guess the issue they face is that there's nothing particularly special about the DTS sound track these days[3]. Is there no technical benefit between DTS:X and Dolby Atmos? I sounds like DTS supports more speakers.
Outside of streaming video, does it matter for gaming? It seems like if my console could output a DTS:X signal to my AVR, assuming my AVR supported it, I could setup 32 speakers (and pretend I could tell the difference between that and, say, 9), but I'm know there's people who would care if that exists. I know my Xbox S can output some compressed formats to my AVR, I'm not sure if DTS:X is among them, but there are those who would pay for that ability, delivered by software (if MS isn't doing that already).
So, not taking into account whether or not Xperi could survive the smaller -- high-end only -- market or not (it's a pretty big space), having support for a better audio codec for just the uses of "discs/Plex" and non-video is going to rank higher than most of the trivialities I've seen hundreds dropped on by people in the high-end home theater/audio space[4]. Maybe that means cranking up the licensing fees, and my category of owner no longer has the next generation's DTS creation available to it. It also probably matters a lot less to me in that category because the sound quality of the DD:Atmos tracks that I've heard have all been on the great side. Once it passes a certain threshold, people in my category don't care about it -- our other equipment probably doesn't support some of the things DTS:X provides that DD:Atmos doesn't (my AVR handles 9.1 speakers in various configurations, max).
[0] Kindly, preferably, I won't hold you to it.
[1] It amplified deep all the way through mid-range, but just below an average woman's voice, so if soundtrack sounds, noise/effects, or a man's voice would be 10-20% louder than a woman's. We needed some dampening panels but it's a lake house, main floor -- all windows except for the one spot it makes sense to put a TV.
[2] Or even "purchased speakers they had to buy one by one, separately", since most of the companies requiring you to do that at least partly because it's hard to sell integrated 7.1/5.1 sets in the $3,000+ range.
[3] Maybe there never was, but the DTS tracks on some movies have bullets that fly through me whereas the DD tracks they wouldn't leave the center speaker. I've heard many, perfect DD tracks, but among my collection I have several examples where the DTS track sounds perfect and the DD track sounds like up-mixed stereo, and a small handful where the DD track is great ... provided you don't listen to the DTS track, where everything is just a little wider, particularly in the back, and it makes everything kind of "line up" better -- a guy runs past the camera and the footsteps come from behind just to the right, whereas the character goes through you on the DD side. It also seemed as though the DTS tracks engage the LFE parts. I have an old-school piston ButtKicker under my couch, we feel that, and when that part is off, it wrecks the experience of some movies for us (my favorite being sending some of the notes from a sound-track's bass guitar into LFE where it over-powers everything else going on). I have only anecdata, I'll admit, though.
[4] I'm just jealous -- very happy with the sound of my own system, but I know a few people who obsess and spend a lot of money, constantly tweaking/upgrading their Home Theater space and when you hear the same movie played on their perfect system, you come home and it briefly makes your system sound like the speakers are empty soup cans connected by rope to the receiver.
[+] [-] naoqj|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewmackrodt|3 years ago|reply
Personally I do like the Dolby Atmos plugin, I have my computer connected to a TV with sound passed via eARC to my soundbar. However, if you're consuming Film/TV with such a setup, you probably just want to enable Dolby/DTS passthrough instead.
[+] [-] FridgeSeal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dstaley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] benplumley|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] markdown|3 years ago|reply