AC-3 DTS or Dolby Digital

[punkuk]

Can someone explain the differance

I have a Pioneer DV-05 which up too last week played AC-3 (It would detect AC3 automaticly and send that info to my amp Kenwood 1090VR which was AC3 compatable) but then the DV-05 decided that it would not reconize the AC-3 format so I took it to a Pioneer repair shop......... $450 to replace a chip.

But then the guy tells me that AC3 is an old vesion of Dolby Digital and that Dolby Digital 5.1 is superior and if I realy wanted the best DTS (My Pioneer suppotrts DTS but the Kenwood does not, not even with an external decoder) my question is does this guy know what he is talking about and is AC3 worth $450 or should I just stick with Dolby Digital or do I buy an amp that supports DTS?
Thanks for any Info

[jbcandkc]

I'm not an expert, but here is my understanding. AC-3 is Dolby Digital. AC-3 can be Mono, 2 channel (stereo), 2 channel + rear (Dolby Surround) or all the way up to 5.1 (left, center, right, rear l+r, plus subwoofer). If you have all the speakers for 5.1, obviously it will sound better. DTS is a competitor to Dolby. IMO it sounds a little better than Dolby 5.1 (but not enough to justify replacing a working Dolby 5.1 amp or receiver) plus most DVDs are Dolby (I have about 100 DVDs and probably only 10 have DTS [and those also have Dolby too!]). I have a Yamaha receiver that takes Dolby and DTS. I looked up your Pioneer DV-05 on the players section and the prices ranged from $200 to $1000 so it's hard to tell if putting $450 into it is a good idea. One last thought...when I first bought my Sony DVD player, my receiver wouldn't recognize Dolby 5.1 from the Sony, I had to go into the menus to tell it to send Dolby 5.1 via the optical output. Maybe check your setup menus to be sure it is set to send Dolby.

Good Luck.

jbcandkc

[Oracle]

I have a Pioneer DV-05 which up too last week played AC-3 (It would detect AC3 automaticly and send that info to my amp Kenwood 1090VR which was AC3 compatable) but then the DV-05 decided that it would not reconize the AC-3 format so I took it to a Pioneer repair shop......... $450 to replace a chip.

AC3 is an encoding format. Dolby digital is encoded using AC3, whether it be 2.0 or 5.1 or whatever.

But then the guy tells me that AC3 is an old vesion of Dolby Digital and that Dolby Digital 5.1 is superior

I think the guy does not know what he is talking about??

and if I realy wanted the best DTS (My Pioneer suppotrts DTS but the Kenwood does not, not even with an external decoder) my question is does this guy know what he is talking about and is AC3 worth $450 or should I just stick with Dolby Digital or do I buy an amp that supports DTS?

DTS is excellent (uses a higher bitrate and is not AC3) but is not on every DVD. AC3 is on almost all DVD`s(99% maybe) except some cheap ones.

If the player is $450 to repair, buy another

[punkuk]

Thanks
I do have a 5.1 set up with my speakers so I guess I can just stick with the Dolby Surround as it will send that signal.

It was just that in AC-3 mode the amp gave me a couple of options that Dolby did not. Mainly the ability to limit the volume of a film to choice of three compression settings a midnight mode 1 midnight 2 and off all thing considered that is the least of my concerns I was more concerned with am I losing seperation or sound quality by not being able to use AC-3 over Dolby Digital
And to add to the mix THX!
My DV supports it my amp does not will I still get the benifits of THX (Whatever they may be) if I do not have AC-3 output? this last question is kinnda mute as the Amp does not support THX. but just for kicks.
Realy what would be the best setup AC-3 DTS Dolby Digital and or THX for a home theater all things considered

Or should I fork out $8 an go see a movie.

[dphirschler]

My understanding is that AC3 is Dolby Digital. It sounds much better than mp2 audio (which is not a DVD spec) and compresses about the same (5:1 or so). DTS take up lots of space as it is either uncompressed or does not compress very well. In the DVD spec, DVDs are required to have either an uncompressed audio (wav?) track or Dolby Digital. DTS is an add-on. This is why many DVDs that have DTS audio also have Dolby Digital. I did hear that publishers were trying to get the DVD consortium to relax that constraint, but I do not know what the outcome of that is/was/will be.


Darryl

[Donny661]

Hopefully this will clarify some things.

Dolby Digital is the same as ac-3, like dphirchler said, and can have up to 8 channels (7.1 channels) in a dvd. It is just a lossy compression (just means it gets rid of stuff to make smaller file size) format created by Dolby and can be compared to other lossy compression formats such as mp3, aac, or ogg vorbis, although Dolby Digital is supposed to sound better. DVD players are required to have either a Dolby Digital or PCM(i'll go into what that is later) audio track so that when people take home their DVD and watch it they don't have to worry about wether or not it will work (With PAL I think they can have and mpeg audio track but i'm not 100% sure). Most people don't want to have to worry about compatibility like they have to when they buy a piece of computer hardware/software. This is why there are still standalone cd/dvd recorders that are more expensive and slower(and in the case of dvd less quality) than if you got a cd/dvd burner for your computer.

Dolby Surround (a.k.a. Pro Logic, Pro Logic II, and sometimes stereo surround) is 2 channels of audio that can be decoded to 4 channels in the case of Pro Logic (center, left, right, surround) or 5 channels in the case of Pro Logic II(center, left, right, r. surround, l. surround) with a capable amp or a separate decoder. A DVD player is required to be able to downmix Dolby Digital to Dolby Surround for ouput on the two analog red and white audio cables. Dolby Surround it not a compression, nor is it uncompressed digital audio. It is a small amount of data that can be slipped into any stereo audio stream like ac-3, mp3, mp2, PCM, or analog sound. This data will then be used by the decoder to separate the two channels into 4 or more separate channels.

PCM stands for Pulse Code Modulation which is uncompressed digital audio that is the same as on cd's and also in many uncompressed .wav and .aiff files. PCM sounds better than any of the compressed formats (i.e. ac-3, DTS, mpeg, etc.), but there are drawbacks to using it which is why most dvds use Dolby Digital. For instance, PCM is uncompressed which means it takes up a lot of space(about 10mBytes/min for cds and even more for dvds because it has a higher sample rate), also you can only have two channels.

DTS is said to be better quality than ac-3 and I also share that opinion. This is because DTS uses higher bitrates and less compression. It uses datarates closer to an uncompressed two channel PCM track but it also allows for more channels. DTS is still just another lossy compression format.

Mpeg audio was created by the Moving Picture Experts Group to go along with their form of video compression. They are responsible for creating the MPEG-1 video compression used in vcds and also MPEG-2 video used in svcds, dvds, satellite broadcast, digital cable, sony's MPEG IMX digital video cameras (their better than DV but cost like $40,000), etc. Also, they created MPEG-4 that's used it DivX, XviD, and M$ .asf format. MPEG audio is still lossy like all the others. I think DVD allows for MPEG audio in PAL countries, but in NTSC countries it isn't allowed without another track that is ac-3 or PCM.

[punkuk]

Thank you forall the replys
Think I will go buy an $8.00 movie ticket
OH yea THX???

[BJ_M]

THX is a marketing ploy (in home theatre) and not a standard or compression scheme ..

[callatis]

How can I convert my audio to Dolby Digital? I authore DVD+R