Sep 13 2009, 08:56 PM, updated 17y ago
)Then yesterday, I had the opportunity to experience DTS-HD MA in SenQ as they were playing Fast and Furious 2 in one of their Jamo demo rooms. I have to say if memory serves me right, I cannot hear any difference at all comparing to my copy of DVD. I was let down on the spot, but thought maybe it was the speakers.
Then I came back home and did some research on HD audio, and this article was very eye-opening (eardrum busting in this case):
http://www.hemagazine.com/node/Dolby_TrueH...ncompressed_PCM
Some of the excerpts from the article:
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To get the latest scoop on these new codecs, Editor-in-Chief Geoffrey Morrison and I made arrangements to visit both companies’ respective headquarters, where we would be able to hear definitive A/B comparisons that would be otherwise impossible to properly set up in our own facilities.
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The shocker came when we compared the lower 448 kbps Dolby Digital DVD bitrate to the original. There was an audible difference, but it was only ever-so-slightly noticeable (and this is with a high end audio system in an acoustically controlled environment that is so far beyond what typical home theater systems are capable of resolving). There was just the slightest decrease in presence with the DD version, not exactly a softening of the sound, but just a tad less ambience and a similarly small tightening of the front soundstage’s depth. Quite a remarkable result, I thought, and I was highly impressed with how much fidelity can be packed into such a relatively small amount of bitspace. If I was doing actual scoring, I would have awarded a 4.8 grade to the results I heard – the audible difference was that subtle.
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It was déjà vu all over again. We switched back and forth between the original PCM master and the core DTS version, and here we found only the slightest, barely noticeable difference. From a frequency response standpoint, both versions were identical, with clearly delineated high frequency details, but the compressed version differed slightly only in barely noticeable presence —that sense of being “there”, with the original PCM track having just slightly greater overall richness. Whatever acoustic elements were removed in the code/decode process were clearly superfluous, at least for the most part, as the audible differences were so minor as to be almost unnoticeable—again, another testament to the capabilities of this highly refined codec.
and the finishing blow...QUOTE
What impressed, or perhaps surprised, me most about these tests was how good the base codecs actually are. The difference between the original audio and the basic Dolby Digital and DTS is a lot subtler than you’d expect, given the extreme amount of compression (around 10:1, a similar ratio to that of 128 kbps MP3).
What a bummer... 
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