I am waiting for my dealer to install Kaleidescape in a soon to be installed totally new home theater. Has everyone ever compared the SAME movie on say Vudu DD 5.1+ verse Kaleidescape DTS 5.1 HD MA? I know on paper the bits rates are higher on DTS 5.1 HD MA but what I’m looking for are actually A-B test.
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DTS HD MA Verses Dolby Digital Plus
- Thread starter cgreene
- Start date
mariyoshikong
Well-known member
I haven't specifically AB tested it but back in the early days of Blu-ray there were some discs that defaulted to the Dolby Digital track and on several occasions (somewhere around a half dozen or so) I would notice that the sound was off and check the track and realize it wasn't the lossless one.
The biggest thing I usually notice is that the soundstage is very small and I can localize the speakers themselves.
Looking forward to the testing. I’m going to use a Kaleidescape 4k movie/5.1 DTS HD MA and compare it against Vudu 4k DD+. I’m also going to compare these to the 4K blu ray. I will be testing picture quality on a JVC/Mad VR and a Trinnov processor.
I notice a lot movies from say 2013-2018 on Kaleidescape are in DTS 5.1 HD MA while the blu ray/4K are in 7.1. Also there very few titles in DTS X on Kaleidescape while about 100 in 4k Blu ray.
KDeering
Well-known member
MAKE SURE YOU ARE LEVEL MATCHING THE SOUNDTRACKS FOR THE COMPARISON. That doesn't mean they are on the same setting for volume on the Trinnov, it means that the actual soundtracks are coming out at the same volume IN COMPARISON TO EACH OTHER.
Thanks, I will report my finding.
Agreed 100%, Dolby has tested this before and said Dolby Digital at 640kb is transparent to the LPCM master
mariyoshikong
Well-known member
Out of curiosity I just tested this with the Dark Knight, which is one the discs that defaulted to Dolby Digital. Watching the intro scene, the two tracks were a lot closer than I expected. The sound stage sounded a little more precise and the music seemed a bit more clear with the TrueHD but I think I would have a hard time picking it out in a blind test.
Dolby Digital Plus on streaming is rarely at 640kbps (if ever). Most streaming services use 128kbps for stereo and 256kbps for multi channel. Dolby can claim whatever they claim. Per Nyquist theorem, you need 21-22 bits of range and about 40kHz sampling frequency (2 samples per each frequency therefore about 20khz range), that’s roughly 1.75mbps of data per each stereo pair. You can advocate that certain sounds aren’t audible or blanked by other sounds using psychoacoustics but removing 90% (at 128kbps) of the information then claiming it is transparent is a bit of a stretch. Yes it will be transparent to those who watch their movies on an iPad or TV speakers.
Here's a good read about this topic....
Signal to Noise - Dolby TrueHD & DTS-HD MA vs. Uncompressed PCM | Home Entertainment
DDP Opener 300.jpg How well do the new compression schemes from Dolby and DTS stack up against uncompressed audio? We buff up our golden ears to audition and compare the latest Blu-ray audio codecs, in the design labs that developed them. Compared to
If you do further search, you will see that those bitrates are reserved for certain content but not all.
Perhaps, I will raise this question to all. If streaming media had audibly equal quality, why did we spend $30k+ on our Kaleidescape equipment?
I believe all those psychoacoustics studies highly underrate how sophisticated human brain is. They write off chunks of musical information as can’t be heard. On the other hand, some other studies suggest high res audio such as 192KHz (or even higher sampling) soundtracks are fully recognized by our brains even though our ears can only hear up to 20KHz at best (more like 12KHz if you are over 40 like me).
Let´s phrase it like: "has the potential to be better".
What you will most likely compare this way is the different mixes done for the two audio tracks and not the difference between the acutal formats.
Fair enough. Then there will be no way to compare.