Azryan " My question is... I thought movie theaters have the same soundtrack as DVD."
Try as I might I could not find absolute references to the bit rates used for DTS or DD in movies, or at least not a definitive source anyway. In the case of DD I found a news article that discussed DD on movies and it said the bit rate for theaters was limited to 320kps due to the way they digitally encoded between the sprockets of the film. I could find nothing for DTS at all.
Now I know that most DVD's that have DD tracks use higher bit rates (Somone with a bitrate display on their player could confirm on a few titles, my player doesn't have a bitrate display, but many AVS members confirmed this). This can only mean one thing. The tracks that we have on our DVD's are actually better quality than in movie theaters due to the increased bit rate meaning less compression. I believe that the same is true for DTS, most DTS titles have a bit rate of 700kbps. Although DTS is a little more nebulous. In the case of DTS there is a separate player for the audio in cinemas but the data comes on CD ROM, one of ther players had three drives so they have a limit of around 1.5 gig for sound if all three drives are used. Their current systems are only sampling at 48khz but their latest player for cinemas which can store the audio for up to 30 movies at a time on its hard drive and supports 24/96khz and this will start appearing in theaters soon. So the ante is being upped in cinemas via DTS and DD will follow no doubt.
What I am sure of is that the DVD sound tracks are remixed and done separately to the DD/DTS movie sound tracks. This makes sense to me as well, as depending on the amount of space available on the DVD and the bit rate used they would need to take it from the masters and then compress from there.
All the above does is raise more questions than it answers but based on the number of AVS threads I read suffice it to say that I believe that the bulk of teh DD and DTS tracks we recieve on DVD are superior to their movie counterparts. When DTS 24/96 appears this will change and we will have an inferior DTS mix than will be available in some theaters.
The best link I found on the AVS forum to do with this is below, the discussion takes a while before some knowledgable people step in so go past the first page:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=268437&highlight=bitrateAzryan " What? If MLP was manditory, then why are there DVD players that don't play DVD-A -which is the only use of MLP? "
MLP is part of the current DVD standard ala DVD-A. All I was saying is that in order to be backwards compatiable with the original DVD spec they would have to have a decoder for it anyway. The only problem is that the player itself only has the decoder and not the surround processor which means sound would have to come out of the discrete outputs on the player.
Well after doing a lot of searching I feel as if I know less than when I started. Very frustrating. If I get some spare time in the next month I will download a DD encoder and encode some hi-rez sound just so that I can listen to it for myself and make a more qualified statement as to how good or bad DD is on various bit rates. I think that would be the only fair way to compare.
