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DD & DTS

Okay, I've read some reviews on the difference between DD & DTS. I understand some of it now. I'm not building a home theater, I just want 5.1 in my living room. I found a nice system for a nice price; hard to beat deal. It has all the usual features (DD, Proligic, DSP, etc.), but no DTS, or even Prologic II. My question is: is it foreseeable that DTS is going to pass up DD and I won't be able to rent DVD's with DD in 2,3, 4+ years. I know nobody has a crystal ball, but I'm not that up on tech. changes in the home audio world. I know I'll be happy with DD 5.1 unless it leaves me behind and new releases are DTS. Any thoughts? Thanks.
cdkalka62d
treyhoss
287 posts
 
DD will always be a viable format since Dolby Labs is such a huge company. DTS, IMO, does sound better, however. Whenver the option exists to buy a movie with a DTS soundtrack (over a DD), I will do so. Unfortunately, there are more films in DD (which can still be pretty good) so you should be OK with a receiver that does only DD. Even films with DTS will have a DD track with it so you shouldn't be "left out". I would strongly encourage you to get a receiver or pre/proc that decodes DTS, however. It is a higher bit-rate encoding/decoding system that I do find to be superior to Dolby digital. -Tony
madhf
170 posts
 
Fully agree with Tony. IMHO dts sounds better to me in all most every case (even against sacd & dvd-a) Also note that most dvds ( including dvd-a) have both dts and DD formats. I think dvd-a has a better potential than sacd as dvds can hold much more data. Also dts 96/24 is as clean a sound as you can get and plays on all dvd players with dts capability. (check out Queens video hits esp. Boheimian (sp?) Rhapsody) Never cared for the song until I heard it in dts 96/24--wow!
eldartford
4,262 posts
 
It's said that Prologic II is a big improvement over PL I.
My experience is only PL II, but you ought to be careful about adopting the older scheme.
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