DTS Digital Surround
While sitting in a movie theatre before the movies starts, a sudden burst of sound could be heard from all direction travelling from all around you with superb sound clarity and realism. As this happens the movie screen is filled with shattering effects and the words DTS appears. It keeps you wondering if it is possible to achieve this effect in you own home theatre system. Well, look no further the DTS Digital Surround has now expended to home theatre market.
What is DTS Digital Surround?
DTS Digital Surround is another type of encoding and decoding that utilise six discrete channels producing digital sound. Digital sound is when there are 6 channels or 5.1 channels of signal where it comes from the right, center, left, left rear, right rear and a low frequency channel being the 0.1 channel. This differs to the Pro Logic where the surround speakers are mono. DTS is the second type of digital sound, Dolby Digital or Ac-3 being the first. However in considering both systems, technically DTS is by far having superior quality. DTS first appeared in the movie theatre in the premier of the movie Jurassic Park where Steven Spielberg was introduced to this system and saw the sonic quality of the DTS. He decided to take up the challenge and it turned out to be a success and research was done so it can be enjoyed by the home theatre market. This will be taken a step further by expanding into the music industry by having multi channel music.
What is needed to run DTS Digital Surround?
The DTS soundtrack is recorded in the digital track of the laser disc. This will be a totally separate disc to the Ac-3 because Ac-3 is recorded on the left analog track of the disc and that they are not compatible.. The only requirement for DTS is to have a digital output on the laserdisc player and the DTS decoder chip. It is said that there are over 1.2 million laserdisc players having digital output that means that there is no need to purchase a new laserdisc player. The DTS decoder can be purchases separately or a chip can be added to your existing amplifier as long as there are the correct connections. Finally a laser disc encoded in DTS Digital Surround will be needed to achieve the shattering sound. However there are a few minor setbacks that will not course much of a problem as time progress. The first problem is that there have been more Ac-3 titles as well as decoder in the market, this means that Ac-3 still have the upper hand. DTS have been working on this and have releases a few DTS laser discs and only have a handful of licensees that can use the DTS chip on their decoder. An example is that in Sydney Australia we have the DTS laserdisc however there is no available decoder for the software. Therefore the success of DTS will be on the quick implementation of the system and there no doubt DTS will turn out a success in the home theatre market as well as for movie theaters.
Comparison of Dolby Digital and DTS Digital Surround
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Dolby Digital DTS Digital Surround
Date rate for 5.1 channels 384 kilobytes per second 1 411 kilobytes per second
Resultant Data Compression Reduction
12:1 3:1
Sound Quality Audibly inferior to current CD 20-bit sound quality superior to current CD
Movies on laserdisc Playable only with RF output (50 000 US households)
Playable with standard digital output (over 1.2 million US households)
Music CD's (mixed in
multichannel discrete surround) None Playable with standard digital output (over 4 million US household)
Hardware decoders 40 + licensees 12 current licensees
40 + by January 1997
Theatre Installations 1 478 North America 3 088 Worldwide
4 180 North America 7 251 Worldwide
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Courtesy Widescreen Review (Issue 20)
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