As a practical matter, it's very difficult to tell any difference in a theater between good SRD and good DTS. They both can sound great. On paper though, DTS has clear advantages. The Dolby "bit-bucket" scheme where bits are "borrowed" from one channel to fill out another channel is just not conducive to achieving the best possible soundfield. DTS does not have this issue as all channels are fully discrete. DTS also has more bits to work with, less compression, as others have noted.

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sorry for being nit-picky... but at least I'm posting, eh?

On a side note, I'd love to see multi-channel (5.1 or more) non-sync inputs.

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one film that impressed me recently with its DTS track was THE LAST CASTTLE. but there are many.

on dvd, dolby uses dialnorm (..... well...) and often times, the master is downcooked before being encoded in Dolby 5.1 to be able to be heard "better" in stereo on tv speakers or mini systems ( by the mass of consumers ). dts tracks are not. but this is out of discusion here

btw: how did you like the dts track of BLACK HAWK DOWN ?

Well, this isn't on ALL processors, but the latest Panastereo CSP2200 Digital Cinema Processor (which ain't digital at all, but rather a premium analog controller for the analog feeds from a Digital Cinema system) DOES offer multichannel non-sync inputs for doing exactly what Mark asks for.

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Oscar Neundorfer
Chief Engineer
SMART Devices, Inc.

It is amazing to consider what is possible for DTS using 4.7GB DVD-ROM or DVD-R discs. Using the 3:1 compression DTS CAC home theater algorithm, if you doubled the bitrate from 1536kb/s to 3072kb/s you could fit nearly 204 minutes of 12 channel audio onto one single disc! Pretty amazing. For uncompressed 20/48 12 track audio, you'll get nearly one hour of audio on a disc.

Using something like Meridian Lossless Packing or some other lossless 2:1 audio compression format (perhaps DTS could develop one of their own) you would get 2 hours of 12 channel 20/48 audio on one disc.

One would have to go to multiple DVD-ROM/DVD-R discs if something like 24-bit/96kHz audio in 12 channel form was to be used. But most any DTS system sold these days features three CD-ROM drives. What's the difference in having three DVD-ROM drives?

For good data throughput, and guarding against possible playback errors due to the more fragile nature of DVD discs, it might be a good idea to include a built in hard disc to store audio data and have that used for playback. Hard drive capacities are really huge anymore and it would be no problem to offload data from one, two or even three DVDs. Have the machine download the audio from the discs while you are building up the film print.

And besides, do you see DTS desupporting their CD format anytime soon? Are these prints going to run around with a pair of DTS CDs, as well as a DTS DVD?

Perhaps DTS will pioneer digital distribution before we get real digital cinema, since they could really benefit from an out-of-band distribution mechanism for soundtracks.

I don't think mixing for 10.2 Surround should be anymore difficult than doing work for 5.1 presently. Professional computer driven sound mixing systems like Pro Tools offer visual metaphors for placing sounds in the listening environment and channel panning effects. The 10.2 format would simply be a more gradual format in which to output the sound mixdowns. 10.2 Surround would not create a big workflow change in how a lot of sound is aquired and prepared. Many film sound designers work with passages of audio containing literally hundreds of discrete tracks. The final mix could be "folded down" into 10.2 and 5.1 just about as easy as doing 5.1 alone (with the word "easy" being a relative thing).

As to DTS CDs becoming obsolete, there's little danger of that. The same time code applied to 35mm prints right now could be used to drive multiple formats. Only the media itself and type of hardware used for playback changes. The film print remains the same.

On the SDDS-8 thing, I think the problem in why so few SDDS-8 films were made is that there really are not very many SDDS-8 equipped theaters. The vast majority of all SDDS installations are 5.1. I don't know the exact numbers, but with most multiplex installations I would say SDDS-8 wired systems are outnumbered by SDDS-6 installations by at least a 6:1 or 8:1 margin. There may be fewer than 1000 SDDS-8 installations worldwide (and there are less than 10,000 total).

#1 A very large hard drive that can store several (the more the better) dts sound files so that the cdrom drives only need to be used once to load up the new movie. This would extend the cdrom useful life immensely.

#2 I would hope they will start issuing a "C" disc. The "A" and "B" discs would carry the same 5.1 channels of audio to keep playback backwards compatible with the units in theaters currently, but the "C" disc could be DVD based and would carry a full 9 channel discrete mix (5 stage speakers, 3 surrounds...discrete, 1 subwoofer). If possible, perhaps even have uncompressed audio. Whatever they end up doing, of course I'm sure they will keep it backwards compatible.

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