RSS Feeds
Regulars
Giz Explains: Dolby, DTS and Home Theatre Audio Codec Confusion
Posted by Matt Buchanan at 4:00 AM on July 24, 2008
You actually know what some of the crazy doodles on the side of an HDTV means when it comes to video--720p, 1080i, 1080p. Congrats, you're ahead of most people, like my mother. But do you understand the alphabet soup of audio, the confounding constellation of logos on your Blu-ray player's box? While there are basically two rival home-theatre audio encoders--Dolby and DTS--they each have several different quality levels and options for different scenarios. Yeah, it's a lot to keep up with, and it annoys us too. So we asked Dolby and DTS to put down their guns for a sec and help us sort it out.
Today, SCEA announced that the latest PS3 update, 2.30, would bring the ability to decode DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution Audio tracks, that is to say, Blu-ray audio at variable bit rates up to 24.5Mbps, and 7.1 streaming of 96K/24-bit tracks. Does this make PS3 the best Blu-ray player ever? If you've got a receiver that can take an uncompressed audio stream of that magnitude via HDMI, then we think it does. UPDATE: To be clear, this decodes the DTS formats—plus Dolby's formats, including Dolby TrueHD—and outputs all channels via HDMI to a receiver that can take a 5.1 or 7.1 PCM stream. It won't do 5.1 or 7.1 analogue output. Also, as some of you have noted, it does NOT bitstream the DTS or Dolby data to a decoder inside a newer decoder-equipped receiver.
