Others may disagree, but your post made it sound like "digital is better" as a fact. It reminds me of when "HQ" (for "High Quality") was the big buzzword for VHS decks and everybody just HAD to have it, even though the picture difference was so subtle it wasn't worth the hassle of an A/B comparison.

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After years of trial and error what eventually turned out was SDDS, SRD, and DTS each with their own proprietary perceptual coding methods each of which has its merits and downfalls. Note: some Sony coding is licensed thru Dolby(funny eh?)

Phychoacoustics (3 principles):
The variation of human auditory sensitivity and perceived loudness with frequency and time and frequency masking of sounds and discrimination between bands of frequencies.

Sony's ATRAC and DOLBY's AC-3 similarly transform audio signals to the frequency domain thru bit allocation and floating point conversion etc etc etc.... The process is similar but not the same.

Some folks think they hear a difference? hmmmm not sure bout that.....Even if you had the ability to directly compare between digital formats on the same sound system, you need to know what coding artifacts to listen for and what types of audio signals are likely to tax the limits on certain codecs(such as transients and multitone signals)
STILL THAT IS NOT ENOUGH!!!...
You need access to the original uncompressed sound mix as well as encoders for each format so that virtually every possible variable in making such comparrisons can be controlled. Then you can decide which format is trully best.

Timothy,

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No it was not, good old mono. Trust you to pick that up!

I saw a few films at Village East End in Melbourne in the late 1970's early 1980's and they used to run the Dolby Stereo presented with Eprad SuperStarscope logos. I could not recall specifically which were in Dolby at that time, but I do remember seeing Hooper there. Others were Orca, Battlestar Galactica, Mission Galactica, Orca, Abba The Movie, Porky's, etc

I recall it being frustrating at the time to figure from the ads what shows were Stereo (4/6 mag or later Dolby). Shows in 4 track mag in the 1970's were generally not advertised as such. Often the fact a film was in 70mm was not advertised either. I recall Grease moving from the Bercy in 4 track to the Forum in 70mm 6 track and it was not even advertised as stereo! Boy, it sure sounded good in 70mm compared to when i saw it later in mono!