Is the DTS vs. Dolby war effectively over? | Hacker News Reader

Is the DTS vs. Dolby war effectively over?

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117 pointsprima-facie158 comments

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Yes, Dolby won. By being cheap to implement.

I used to work in this space and I've dealt with:

- Barco Auro 3D

- Frauenhofer MPEG-H

- Dolby Atoms

- DTS:X

The idea behind Auro3D is to just use a lot of discrete channels, which is great for cinemas with a static playback architecture, but there's no way to adjust the mixing based on the listener's speaker setup. So it is difficult to make sound great for home use unless you have lots of space to hang things on your ceiling. (5 top speakers needed)

MPEG-H can do everything but it's difficult to configure and was fully specified very late, after Dolby Atmos was already in production. That said, this is the agreed-upon default standard for broadcast, because it supports stuff like 200 language-independent 3D objects + 5 language-dependent voice actor tracks, all positioned in 3D. MPEG-H can also be converted easily to Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.

Many professionals agree that DTS:X is the best quality consumer option. It also theoretically supports quite a lot of customization. But ASIC implementations tend to freeze those because otherwise it's too expensive. And it still is expensive.

Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters with delay modules in between. That means it's by far the lowest-tech solution on the list. And that means cheap ASIC implementations. I believe this is why Atmos won.

If I remember correctly, DTS:X is a $4 chip, Atmos is a $0.5 chip.

What's your perspective on Ambisonics?

It was dead on arrival for movies, because everyone is used to working with (and tweaking) discrete channels. That's why MPEG-H and Auros were successful there, because you could just use your existing 10.1 content, add some top speakers, and call it 3D cinema. Also interference between speakers is a real thing for cinemas and you hire expensive professionals to measure your room and tweak per-speaker FIR filters. With Ambisonics, all channels are kinda correlated by default, which makes getting rid of interference more difficult.

But the UE5 implementation is very promising, both performance- and quality-wise: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/native-soundfield-am...

My personal opinion is that Ambisonics will be the future for games on headphones, but not gain much traction elsewhere. I mean, Dolby Atmos is "good enough" for pretty much everywhere and once you reach its limits, MPEG-H is there to cover those last weird 1% of cinema and TV usecases.

Dolby Atmos virtualization is said by gossip to be a few 32-tap IIR filters

FIR, right? That's crazy long for an IIR filter.

They are trying to model ~1s of total reverb time for the headphone case, so I'd consider a 32-tap FIR way too short. 32-tap IIR sounds highly numerically unstable, but appropriate to me.

Is there any example of a technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one? (In media recording and replay, at least).

This seems to happen again and again, with the cheap and simple option always winning.

The audio CD surpassed sales of vinyl records and cassettes. CDs arguably offer better sound (subjective I know) over vinyl and cassettes.

I'm going out on a limb here but wouldn't CD's be both cheaper and simpler to manufacture too?

You're probably correct. That means the audio CD offered cheaper manufacture and superior sound. (Vinyl lovers will dispute the superior sound claims.)

Call CD sound "more accurate". Vinyl lovers historically loved vinyl precisely because they love the particular inaccuracy it imparts. CDs are more accurate. Brutally so at times, even. Especially when they're being really, really accurate at conveying clipping brought on by the loudness wars.

(Now I suspect vinyl's main purpose in life is as a marker of being a discriminating consumer who doesn't want to be a victim of the loudness war, since you can't overdrive a vinyl record in the same way for physical reasons. It is unfortunate that one must go to such measures to opt out of "music that sounds like crap because you ruined it, you stupid music companies".)

Not in 1982. CD players were very expensive to manufacture and buy and making discs was harder too. Over time it got cheaper because a potato could do the decoding and the lasers got cheap and economies of scale allowed it. But at first it was very expensive, discs cost like twice as much as vinyl albums.

A record player is mechanically and electrically much simpler. And vinyl disks are just pressed vinyl. You can buy a toy kit to build a record player, a CD player is just too complicated.

> You can buy a toy kit to build a record player, a CD player is just too complicated.

you don't need a toy kit, to get sound of a vinyl. but yes it's basically impossible to build a laser and tech to read cd-da and than get audio from it...

well there is https://www.theaudioeagle.com/columns/column07.html but you need a dac and a cdm device, vinyl only needs paper and pencil (fun fact a guy from r&d of dts showed that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaqmdcaF87w)

Apparently vinyl records have now surpassed CDs in sales.

https://qz.com/2111339/vinyl-outsold-cds-in-the-us-for-the-f...

Not for any practical reason, though. CDs were the epitome of practical. They're not vintage enough for them to be cool yet. Give it a while longer and CDs will have fallen so far out of the public eye that they'll become a niche once again and people will be scouring to find old 98 Degrees CDs.

Don't CDs have relatively short shelf lives? Not as bad as floppies, but still -- will people be able to take 50 year old CDs and spin them up?

Recordable ones use dyes which fade if exposed to sunlight and temperature.

The pits that represent data in factory manufactured discs are laser etched, so if the polycarbonate layer doesn't decay in 50 years it should be OK. Betting they would as long as kept from moisture. Even if the reflective layer is compromised I think it would somehow be possible to reapply it to the polycarbonate layer which has the pits.

Below is an excerpt from https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub121/sec4/#:~:text=Among....:

CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs are similar in that they are replicated discs-that is, the data are physically pressed into the disc when it is manufactured. ROMs are generally mass-produced and contain music, video, computer applications, or interactive games.

ROM disc longevity is determined by the extent to which its aluminum layer is exposed to oxygen. Oxygen, including pollutants, can migrate through the polycarbonate layer or the hard lacquer layer (CD label side and edge), carried in by moisture. Oxygen or moisture can more easily penetrate through scratches, cracks, or delaminated areas in the label. Oxygen can also be trapped inside the disc during manufacturing, although manufacturing improvements have reduced the likelihood of this.

If left in a very humid environment, moisture-and oxygen-will eventually reach the aluminum, causing it to lose its reflectivity. The normally shiny aluminum, which resembles silver, becomes oxide-dull and much less reflective, like the color of a typical aluminum ladder. The combination of high humidity and increased temperatures will accelerate the oxidation rate.

The life expectancy of a ROM disc therefore depends on the environmental conditions to which it is exposed over time. Generally, it is best to keep ROM discs in a dry, cool environment. If the disc is removed from a humid, hot environment to an ideal condition before damage has been done, it will “dry out” and should be as playable as if it had been kept in ideal conditions all along. Other contaminates, however, such as inks, solvents, and pollutants, have the potential to irreversibly penetrate and to deform, discolor, or corrode the disc, causing permanent reading problems for the laser.

Commercially manufactured CDs have an extremely long shelf life, assuming they are properly handled and not exposed to UV light or extreme conditions. They will probably outlive you. Short shelf life is mainly an issue with cheap CD-R and DVD-R recordable media. The dyes tend to decay over time.

I don't know that compact discs were more expensive to produce than vinyl or cassettes. I'm sure they were at first, but costs must have come down drastically by the time you could buy big spools of RW+ CDs at Best Buy for $20.

CDs are smaller than vinyl records, so that brings down shipping costs. From a consumer's perspective vinyl records require a lot of maintenance: needles need to be changed, records should be kept free from dust.

Cassettes are small, but complicated. I wouldn't be surprised if cassettes are more expensive to produce than compact discs. It is interesting that while CDs overtook cassette tapes in the 90's (aside from mixed tapes shared between friends), Laser Discs didn't become more popular than VHS until DVDs. Maybe the difference in visual quality wasn't worth the effort to switch media until televisions became larger larger and sharper.

> more expensive

There's pressing a flat circle in a factory somewhere, and there's

- printing album art, making sleeves, etc.

- storage

- distribution

- retail space

- "shrinkage" (ok, stealing a CD is easier)

- ... ?

Ipod over walkman?

Can someone seriously explain why this is getting downvotes?

On HN it's generally considered bad form to dispute downvotes.

IMHO there's nothing wrong with your original comment, except perhaps brevity. Maybe somebody was of the opinion that you needed to make the argument that a Walkman is simpler than an iPod.

I’m not deep enough into the culture to know whether disputing, or simply asking for explanation, of a downvote is “bad form”, but i would bet that using downvotes as an alternative to a cogent rebuttal is considered “worse form”. And there’s no way to counter it except to do as gp did and call it out, asking for explanation. Unfortunately the downvoter is unlikely to ever offer an explanation. So the gp and others like him (myself at times) relies on the crowd to figure out whether or not there’s a misunderstanding. Discouraging that, when the downvote is seemingly arbitrary, doesn’t help the situation at all.

How else can a downvoted commenter, and bystanders, learn?

Thanks for understanding. Not disputing it, just bothering to understand if I can.

Disclaimer: didn’t downvote.

Because it contrasts something from 1979 with something from 2001 and fails to explain how this is a relevant example for the discussion.

> technologically superior and higher quality option winning over a cheap and simple one

It was a direct answer to that question, and IMO a good one. Some in this thread appear to feel that we inexorably move towards a disposable culture, and this is a clear counterexample.

How is directly answering a question with a counterexample not contributing to the discussion? I shouldn't be so annoyed at this, but I admit that I am.

"Technologically superior" is kind of relative to comparison group. As a consumer who does not enjoy particularly high salary, "is it affordable" is an important consideration when buying any technological product.

What do I mean when I say "relative to"? When DVD became available, people bought DVD players, which were superior to VHS. And TV+VHS was a superior technology compared TV alone. And TV displays have become much better than they were when VHS was brand new.

Blu-ray over hd DVD is the first thing that comes to mind

Not really "winning" per se, but lossless audio is fortunately seeing an improvement over the last few years. It's become a minor selling point on online streaming services (Spotify, Apple music, Deezer etc all provide some level of lossless music). Services like Tidal explicitly advertise themselves as high quality. Apparently as long as you can market it people will buy it and it will improve :')

(See also: improvements in audio sstreaming codecs to Bluetooth headphones in the last few years)

Spotify has nothing lossless in offer (yet)

Sorry, my bad. I mainly use Deezer (which has FLAC).

I think you need to caveat that as within the same timeframe, lots of examples people are coming up with is technology coming out AFTER - blu ray triumphed over dvd because it was a later and better technology. CD triumphed over tapes in the same way and neither of these examples were cheaper when they first came out.

Bluray did decisively win over its contemporary rival HD-DVD.

Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive? I don't remember that being the case, but it may have been. I think the ubiquity of the PS3 was the decider for that generation, so I guess, if it was more expensive, it's a decent example.

Bluray was generally superior yes. It wasn't flat out better in all ways, but it was at least on parity if not better to HD-DVD. Cost wise, it depends on what exactly we're talking about (Cost of disc, cost of licensing, etc), but blu ray succeeded largely due to Sony willing to take an estimated ~$3B loss on the hardware sales of the PS3 and leverage it's media partnerships to see the format succeed in the long term. Selling the PS3 at a deficit was instrumental in getting BluRay players into peoples homes en-masse, which then in turn allowed Sony to better negotiate media partners to use their format.

So was it cheaper? No, I don't think so, but Sony was willing to eat a loss to make it "cheaper" for the end consumer. Technically, people paid more for a bluray than for an HD-DVD player, as a PS3 was definitely more expensive than a standalone player/drive for either, but the value proposition was definitely there, as many people wanted a PS3 regardless.

In short, the value was there, both for the media companies and end consumers, for bluray as opposed to HD-DVD, but I'm not sure it was explicitly "cheaper".

HD DVD was released with the xbox 360 by Microsoft earlier than Sony's PS3, so that value proposition goes both ways. HD DVD was cheaper too. The number of consoles sold isn't that different (Sony sold ca. 15% more over the entire lifetime of the console).

At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.

Being earlier doesn't mean it has a better value proposition. It just means it had an opportunity for entrenchment before a competitor can bring their product to market. Had they successfully leveraged that opportunity, that would be valuable, but they didn't. Microsoft/HD-DVD decidedly squandered that opportunity considering the PS3 (primary BR player purchased pre 2010) launched a year later than Xbox but had sold as many units in ~1 yr as the xbox had in 2, effectively eliminating any such market advantage in it's first year.

> HD DVD was cheaper.

Correct. Which is why my comment talked about value, and why "X is cheaper" as an individual metric in and of itself is not useful in measuring success. BR and the PS3 was decidedly more expensive. People still bought more of them than HD-DVD/360.

> At the time there were many claims that the porn industry would be the deciding factor.

Which was almost as laughable then as it is now.

You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3. I counterclaimed by saying that HD DVD had the same advantage. PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million, the difference is not that much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_cons...

edit: It looks like my claim was not correct, a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.

Yeah, if the 360 had included an internal HD-DVD drive at the same price point we might be somewhere very different.

(Thought to be honest BluRay would probably still have won as dual-format drives based on BluRay appeared later).

"a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360."

Once again demonstrating the murderously huge difference between hardware that ships with the platform and attempts to add on hardware to the install base later.

Exceptions will leap to mind, like the rumble pack for the N64 or the Dualshock controller, but in general, add-on attempts fail and fail miserably for gaming consoles. They don't leap to mind precisely because they failed.

> You claimed the reason why Blu Ray won was mostly because it was bundled with the PS3

And Sony's partnerships with media companies, yes. Both of these are true.

> PS3 sold about 87.3 million while xbox 360 sold about 84 million

I was referring to sales when xbox been on the market twice as long (2 years) as the PS3 (1 year) at calendar end (2007). If the 360 had an early-to-market advantage, it became irrelevant real quick and never recovered that sales advantage in any meaningful way once a competitor emerged. [1]

> a HD DVD accessory was required to play HD DVD content on the xbox 360.

Yes. Further cements what I was saying about the PS3 being instrumental in BR taking over HD-DVD as a consumer entertainment format. it also further highlights my original point of how "cheaper" doesn't necessarily mean better value, or better selling, or better adaption. There's more to it than "first" or "cheapest". BR/PS3 were more expensive and later to market than their HD-DVD/360 counterparts, and yet both when on to be as successful if not more so than their cheaper first-to-market rivals. The original question of this thread is how important "cheap" is to a technology attaining success. This is a clear example of "it doesn't". There are plenty of instances however where it absolutely helped. This was just an instance where it did not, or at least, not enough to outweigh other factors against it.

1. https://www.vgchartz.com/tools/hw_date.php?reg=Global&ending...

EDIT: Changed 2017 to 2007 because oops, holy hell it's been 15 years since PS3 launch?! I'm old ffs

HD-DVD was released as an add-on to the Xbox 360, external to the internal DVD drive. The internal DVD drive could not play HD-DVD movies.

Sony's PS3 had the bluray player internally, as part of the base spec.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_HD_DVD_Player

It looks like it was released just days before the PS3 anyways.

EDIT: We both seem to have posted this bit of information at the same time. Sorry!

Yeah it seems I am misremembering things. I found out around the same time as you but thank you for taking the time to clear this up anyway.

Did HD-DVD use Java like Blue-Ray? To this day I found it absurd that they require publishers to ship a Java application along with the content. It is probably the reason there are so many lousy menus. 4K UHD is even worse as many publishers have downright just given up. Everyone is using the same sample code. At least DVD did something interesting when it was released.

I don't know if this is a problem that can be solved. The framework has to accomodate the lowest common denominator and you know some manufacturer will cut costs to the bone so you can't mandate some fancy graphics chip in the spec because it will kill the format before it can become the standard. Is this why they went with Java?

TBF to 4k UHD, the 4k stream is already being compressed significantly on those discs so every byte that doesn't go to content means that that you are compromising the content just a little bit more.

That's also why so many 4k UHD discs don't have any bonus content on them and usually pack a Blu-Ray in.

Really? I rip 4K UHD so I can toss the disc and their crap software in the attic and typically I get 60-80GB per movie. From what I understand, these are 100GB discs right? Are they seriously cutting corners on the quality? If this is the case, now I am royally pissed. I am paying a premium to avoid the Netflix/Streaming compressed garbage and to know that they cut corners here when the whole point is about uncompromised quality...well that is just another blow to any shred of trust I have in these companies.

I mean, the RAW 4k (or 6k or 8k) footage is typically multiple terabytes (almost 15 TB for 2 hours at 8k). That is then compressed down to under a Terabyte for use in the movie theater (typically 200-800GB depending on features and length), and then compressed further to get it onto 100 GB disc. It's important to remember that length is going to play a big part (there is a reason that Snyders Justice League is on 2 discs) and a consistent quality is going to be desired within a catalog.

Yeah it seems like they are not doing their due diligence in terms of codec and compression strategies being used. Obviously we are not going to get uncompressed data(although that would be a dream one day that would probably never happen as resolution will increase with new storage capacities) but I do wonder if they can choose different compression strategies depending on the film. It they are charging premium prices I feel as if it is their responsibility to put in the effort to deliver the best experience that the format is capable of delivering. Otherwise what "value add" is the publisher actually delivering?

Just because something is compressed doesn't mean it's low fidelity. If you're so concerned about your high quality viewing, you should probably spend a few minutes learning the basics. How exactly do you expect 4k@24fps 32 bit color raw to fit in 100GB?

Did HD-DVD use Java like Blue-Ray?

No, that was one of the value propositions to HD-DVD: you don't need to update your disc player in order to watch your new movie. Which apparently was a common occurrence in the early days, in that your player needed an update before your player can play that latest release. HD-DVD users were like, "why does a DVD player need an Ethernet port? Uh, oh..."

HD-DVD's menu software was built primarily by Microsoft and didn't require Java or even support Java. It's menu system was loosely HTML-based XML with some support for CSS-like stylesheets and optional Javascript. Just about everything a movie menu needs (including support for rich animations) could be done entirely declaratively and JS scripting was entirely optional (and rarely used/needed).

It could have been cheaper than Java runtimes needed by Blu-Ray players, but one of the requirements they decided they needed in the menus was live previews of movie content and that wanted multiple active streams of video decompression. These days Blu-Rays fake it with effectively just using animated GIFs in the Java menus, but HD-DVD menus would actually play the movie in things like scene thumbnails (which was neat, but maybe unnecessary). Needing hardware that supported multiple active streams of video decompression to support that is often considered the big reason HD-DVD wasn't cheaper than Blu-Ray especially given the licensing costs and expense of BD-J Java systems.

Thats fascinating! Thank you for the history! It would be cool to see the best implementation of this JS based system however I feel like it would suffer from the some of the same problems as the Java system: namely with so many vendors, how can you ensure that each implementation will contain a robust JS rendering engine? Feels like that would just lead to publishers using off the shelf templates that do the bare minimum as we are seeing on Blueray.

How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.

I wish they would have watched AVGN's comedic take on DVD and Blu-Ray formats and just created a format that met all those specifications. Have you seen these videos?

Warning: Swear words

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsdzaEVeFEE

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tetXKdi9U3c

> It would be cool to see the best implementation of this JS based system however I feel like it would suffer from the some of the same problems as the Java system: namely with so many vendors, how can you ensure that each implementation will contain a robust JS rendering engine?

Like I said the primary rendering engine was primarily XML driven and XML-based. So far as I'm aware the only implementation in HD-DVD's history was Microsoft's (which was a small complaint among the hardware vendors that there was only one firmware for the "base OS" of HD-DVD players), and it was incredibly performant (because it wasn't using scripting to run animations and such). It supported JS for scripting, but that scripting was almost never used in the vast majority of disc menus, and it was probably a very bare JS engine at that and never needed to guarantee performance. The JS could be under-powered because it was an optional add-on for small bits of interactivity like "games and quizzes", it was not driving hardly anything in day-to-day menus. Think "early days of the web" (or maybe HN itself): almost everything is basic HTML and JS is used sparingly for a minimum for just a small subset of interactive features. But if you built an HTML specifically to be a nicely animated Table of Contents for a movie and had years of DVD movie menus to compare for best practices.

> How would the HD-DVD laser cope with having to read multiple streams? or does it read it ahead of time and just cache it somehow? One of the biggest annoyances of DVD was the fact that some player implementation had horrific seek times and so the menu transitions were mind numbingly slow.

Good questions. I'm not as much a hardware person as a software person, so I don't know the answers beyond that I just recall the approach chosen by the HD-DVD standard was considered expensive in contrast to DVD or to Blu-Ray hardware standards at the time. As a user of HD-DVD, there was some noticeable seek lag in the menus, as I recall, but it was kind of magic when it worked.

  Was Bluray technologically superior and more expensive?

It wasn't really superior, in some ways it was better (more capacity per layer) but then lost out by using less efficient codec's, and requiring a significantly more powerful processor to run java rather than having a custom scripting/overlay function while lacking various features (like networking). Much of what HD-DVD had out of the box didn't manage to make it into the bluray specs until a couple years later (revision 2.0 IIRC https://www.cnet.com/culture/blu-ray-profile-1-0-1-1-2-0-exp...).

Some things never made it, like the fact that HD-DVD was region free. The PS3 was a contributing factor but a minor one, In what basically was a studio fight over consumer friendliness (DRM, region locking, backwards compatibility with DVDs since they could be pressed on the backside, instant play requirements, etc), and which camp was willing to pay larger bribes to "win" before the dual mode players became the majority since the later hardware requirements for bluray made it basically capable of also playing HD-DVDs. Plus, streaming was becoming an ever more present topic.

To this day, the bluray experience tends to be worse than HD-DVD as so few blurays ever behaved like HD-DVD (universal iirc being the notable exception since they appear to have ported their HD-DVD interfaces to bluray for a while) when it comes to just playing the movie when the disk is inserted and overlaying menus over the movie as its playing.

> but then lost out by using less efficient codec's

They used the same codecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_high-definition_...

Now they do, but originally all the blurays were mpeg2, it was part of the discussion around quality, and the vc1 codec was used on most HDDVDs vs MPEG2 on blurays nullifying the bitrate differences. IIRC of course, since i'm lazy.

No, you're wrong. The first blu-ray players had support for all those codecs. The first few mastered blu-ray discs were MPEG-2 encoded, but that was because the encoders were more mature at that point.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/sony-on-mpeg-2-for-blu-ray....

Re: Universal menus: they may have ported all their animations and the general look and feel, but there are some strong differences to how the menus functioned on HD-DVD. They animated smoothly on top of the video itself on HD-DVD and in Java they fake that on some movies and stopped trying altogether after a few years. (On some players it's very much the opposite of smooth, it has very clear hiccups and clipping artifacts.) Plus the loss of things like picture-in-picture special features that HD-DVD supported but Blu-Ray never did.

If I recall rightly, this is why VHS beat out the higher quality Betamax back in the day of video tapes - it was cheaper to produce using VHS so everything was on VHS. Because everything was on VHS, that was what people bought and the higher quality Betamax lost enough market to survive.

It's a shame that the higher quality product isn't always what wins and kind of says something about our Walmart approach to life.

A central limitation of Betamax that is rarely mentioned is that the tapes were too short to fit very long movies on them; see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Videotape_format_...

"While VHS machines' lower retail price was eventually a major factor, the principal battleground proved to be recording time. The original Sony Betamax video recorder for the NTSC television system could record for only 60 minutes, identical to the previous U-matic format, which had been sufficient for use in television studios. JVC's VHS could manage 120 minutes, followed by RCA's entrance into the market with a 240-minute recorder using VHS. These challenges sparked a mini-war to see who could achieve the longest recording time."

We've all collectively fallen for Sony's marketing for Betamax. It was not clearly higher quality. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oJs8-I9WtA

Considering beta 2 matches VHS's LP, the quality advantages of Betamax may have simply been that beta 1 just used more tape per minute of recording time.

popularity is expensive. people want quality, and generally arent happy to sacrifice it. but the diminishing returns hits way harder and faster for the common person than a hobbyist typically wants to accept.

popularity is also skewed young. income is skewed old. VHS was a much better fit as a lowest common denominator. If a product is trying to be a popular medium, cheap is necessary.

That said, once the medium is established - people will still happily pay a lot for a high quality product within the medium. iPhone popularity is a good example of this. People bought expensive VHS players with bells and whistles too.

Do you have an email that I can contact you? I run a headphones magazine, Headphonesty and I will love to publish an article on this topic.

This post is me reciting rumors about what I've heard of how things worked and how things played out. I'm not sure that I'm a good source for an article and I can't really officially confirm anything, even if I know it to be correct.

Your best option is probably to email virtual interview questions to Tom Ammermann, the CEO of https://newaudiotechnology.com/ He's a great guy, Granny-nominated sound engineer, and has been working on 3D sound with all those technologies for a long time.

And yet they get away with highway murder at the prices they charge to "experience" Atmos. Everything in this world is a rip off isn't it. Thanks for this background, it is fascinating.

On a side note: I have always like how the traditional DTS tracks sounded compared to Dolby, I always thought it was just me being weird but maybe there is something to it.

I don't get this, especially on a website like HN where so many of us build software where the marginal cost approaches zero.

It isn't about the cost of implementation, it is about the value added. If you don't want Atmos, don't pay for it. There are plenty of high quality sound systems that don't have Atmos compat.

I was referring more to Cinema(although it applies to home market as well). I want to pay for the best experience and I think a lot of people are expecting the very best when they pay $20+ for a Dolby "Premium" experience. If they don't know any better, then they think it is best money can buy.

Furthermore, if there was an option for these others in the market that a consumer could easily buy then I would understand your line of reasoning but most movies are authored with Atmos and so you must buy that system if you want to take advantage of the additional content offered on your favorite movie disc. It would be nice if the film was offered in multiple formats(even on the same disc).

You would think that if all this additional money would be spent, then you might as well ensure it is the very best experience. Instead as the author shows, they are still cutting corners despite charging this price. It is a scam they pull in multiple markets.

I don't think the vast majority of movie goers are able to tell the difference between Atmos and DTS:X. It's almost certainly a case of the marginal value of going from Atmos to DTS:X doesn't make it worth the cost of going from one format to another. Consider also if there was a difference between the audio master technique for Cinema and Home, it just would increase the cost further.

Atmos is pretty good, far better than what was previously readily available.

We had 70mm IMAX which got dropped to Imax Digital(LieMax) and now dropped to Atmos(It is debatable which is better). If they were capable of delivering a certain level of quality and cannot anymore either the value of the dollar has fallen so much that they cannot provide the same quality for the same price(possible) or they are cutting corners somewhere. It is probably a mixture of both.

>I don't think the vast majority of movie goers are able to tell the difference between Atmos and DTS:X.

It does not matter, they are advertising this medium as the best possible movie going experience and charging premium prices reflecting this claim. The fact that it is not worth it to "them" to provide the best experience is a result of them deciding that they want a specific profit margin and will fit as much as they can within that margin.

The audio gear market has always been full of bullshit marketing shenanigans and overpricing. Probably since the first caveman figured out acoustics.

Because almost all of the profit is in the premium for branding, so advertising has a better ROI than research.

Just out of curiosity: Is there some way for consumers to "open" a Atmos soundtrack and see what speakers are outputting sound? I remember seeing some tool that visualizes the speakers as the soundtrack is playing. Is it also possible to edit this and re-compile it back into a finished atmos soundtrack?

I ask because I have this 2010s film that was "re-released" in atmos that has a missing sound effect in a specific scene and despite my attempts to reach out to the studio and director, I cannot seem to get ahold of them. My next thing would be to try and re-add the sound effect back into the atmos soundtrack. Is this possible?

It is somewhat amusing to me that an object based surround sound system has now become dominate after it was so big on PCs with Soundblaster and the A3D cards and was killed by 5.1 and a change in Windows DirectX to stop object based sound from being possible. Sound has really taken a big innovation step back and still isn't at the stage it was 20 years ago, most games nowadays have to use middleware to give environmental sound effects to play out of the 5.1/7.1/headphones that Windows provides, and then we have the special support for Dolby Atmos which competes poorly with the current good solutions on PC.

With games DTS:X for headphones sounded a lot better than Dolby Atmos for headphones but neither compares well to the latest Soundblaster AE and Sennheiser GSX. Alas binaural and environmental sound is very much a tertiary concern for a lot of gamers so its never recovered from the Windows Vista fatal blow.

Now we have the worst sounding solution developed for home theatrees that solves none of the PC gaming issues and doesn't even really do a good job with Movies either on its way to complete dominance. Its quite disappointing how the sound market has played out after all the work done by AMD for raytraced sound reflections and the early hardware implementations that did a similar thing alongside environmental effects and binaural directional sound including the vertical.

In my opinion, the WWISE 3D audio support is top notch. And you can even license my headphone virtualization as a plugin which - of course I'm biased - sounds awesome!

It's just that nowadays, less and less people play with sound at all. Mobile games? Sound doesn't matter. Switch? Sound matters very little. Xbox/PS5? 99% chance you'll use stereo TV speakers anyway.

So the remaining 0.1% of us who have a surround setup connected to a gaming PC have been optimized out of the market. There just isn't enough ROI for gaming companies to spend resources at pleasing 1 out of 1000 players with 3D sound.

The fact that most bluetooth headsets/buds have too much latency for gaming/video probably contributed a bit to that state of affairs.

At least with video playback you can compensate by delaying the image, with gaming that would drastically hurt the user experience.

Speaking from a developer-manager & developer-experience point of view, using Wwise was awful for us -- it remains one of the worst decisions we made on our debut game release. I'm sure it's great for larger studios/shops or for AAA budget titles, but it was a nightmare for our small team.

Stuff like rare crashes on certain semi-obscure hardware, where the crash dumps clearly indicated issues deep within the Wwise (native code) stack, were extremely difficult (or impossible) to debug. Wwise provides zero support for their base licensing fee, you have to pay for service on top of licensing to get any support at all.

Their Unity "SDK" / user-land code was awful, too, and basically had to be 80% rewritten to be usable at the most moderate level of scale. That's more of a gripe, working with their native side more directly wasn't that bad -- and they've perhaps improved their default C#/user-land code since then.

Another grip is that WWISE devs/designers/engineers are expensive, and making any change requires firing up their application.

Overall, the entire experience was poor, especially since we paid for the privilege. My advice would be that you can't seriously consider WWISE for your project unless you have an audio engineer on staff and intend to keep them on staff for the duration of your project (plus a year or two for support).

TLDR: IMO Wwise may be a solid product, but only for projects with a minimum budget of approximately 7 figures.

The surround sound and HRTF on the PlayStation 5 exceeds my expectations. On the famous tech conference, they talked about calibrating the sound space relative your ears to get the best possible surround feel, but that's yet to come.

From what I heard, that's convolution via FFT, so in effect very long FIR filters. And yes, they should be able to fully customize things for your ears and for the headphones by pre-multiplying in the appropriate equalizer FIR filters into the 3D room impulse response.

I have no idea what you just said, so I upvoted.

How does this work, though? They'd have to parameterize it based on the actual room, right? Does that mean the user has to calibrate things manually?

Perhaps it can be done with the microphone in the controller?

Yes, there are algorithms to estimate the room impulse response from speakers and a microphone.

Sony has ear-specific IR/TF tech on android. You can get their app to take a photo of your ears, get the blob back. Tidal and Deezer in turn can use some 360 sound API to play their surround music through this.

Aureal was killed by Creative bringing frivolous lawsuits to drain their cash and then buying out their assets when they went bankrupt.

Yeah, I will forever remain irrationally angry over this. The A3D hardware was great. The HRTF functionality straight up embarrassed Creative's competing products at the time, and the cards were very reasonably priced.

I remember the same day I read the headline about the acquisition on Ars Creative nuked the entire A3D support website.

It's frustrating to me that our system is set up such that a bully company with cash is quite likely to get away with this sort of tactic entirely legally.

Ah, I miss my Gravis Ultrasound. Good times.

Growing up with the DJ/Rave experience, after being primarily interested in MUSIC, not HOME THEATER, I basically have a stereo bias and have no interest in surround-sound formats or multichannel (beyond 2) playback.

I realize that this comment serves no purpose in this discussion, other than as a point of reference for a steady community that has never gone away: that which uses hi-fi playback for stereo music. The soundfield is immersive enough with stereo, and as sound has an inherent latency somewhere around 3ms/meter in 20 degree C air, I find that any large surround-sound setups are incapable of cleanly reproducing events like beats. Dialogue gets blurred, etc.

This is my position as well. I've probably had every combination of surround sound setups imaginable, but nothing beats a really good 2/2.1 setup to my ears.

My takeaway has been that if 2 channels sounds crappy, you need to look at the room, not adding more damn speakers. It's just like shiny cloud tech imo.

I don't think anybody is saying stereo music sounds crappy. It sounds as good as it ever has - really great! But some of us think a good ATMOS setup sounds even better.

The point I was trying to make is that the room is way more important than the speakers or DSP engine.

You could spend 7 figures on commercial ATMOS hardware and still have a $500 setup sound better depending on the room.

Room treatments are technically straight forward, but they come at a cost of interior design and practicality. Many people see it as but if a dark art too, so they’ll take a technical implementation any day because it has been designed to accomodate a wide range of scenarios, and takes the guesswork out.

Placing 5/7/11/n speakers plus a number of subwoofers also comes at the cost of interior design and practicality ;) It's just (usually) easier to do than proper soundproofing and easier to adapt to non-optimal room designs.

Stereo can't provide a true rear or side image for more than one person, and it can't do vertical. Phantom center is great for one person in a good room with eq matched speakers, but for multiple listeners the extra speakers really do matter.

For me, even stereo adds very little over mono when it comes to music. For movies 5.1 seems quite sufficient. As for gaming, every tiny improvement they can make is something I'd be interested in.

For gaming, stereo headphones seem to be best, imo. I've had the same pair of Crossfade LPs for several years, and they give great (as far as I can tell) spatial awareness in games, without any special features.

Amir over at ASR [1] tests single speakers and then will often do a short subjective listen at the end of his reviews. Sometimes he'll mention how enjoyable a single speaker can be and fill the room with music. For myself, I'm rarely in 'the sweet spot' and so most stereo effect is pretty much lost on me anyways. So yeah, I'd agree that there is very much a diminishing return the more channels you add.

[1] https://www.audiosciencereview.com/

I'm using a 2.1 system so this shouldn't affect me, but sadly it does. Lately, even very expensive TV's lack DTS codecs, so playing movies from a DLNA server is not viable anymore, unless you re-encode every audio track. I understand the reasoning, they do not have to care about playing ripped movies on their devices, but I think the $2000 price tag could probably include the DTS license.

It's generally a mess. I have my TV connected to home cinema system via ARC and I need to manually change a setting in the TV to make it output the right format.

The infuriating thing is that the TV _knows_ what format it's dealing with and what it can handle, because when it's showing DTS content and is set to Dolby mode the 'Dolby' is greyed out in the options but DTS is available, and vice versa.

God (e)ARC is awful. I’ve got a Sony OLED, which supports DTS:X and Atmos, and eARC, and a Samsung bar that also supports eARC, and yet neither object-based format will pass through correctly no matter what settings I tweak. Also for some bizarre reason Multichannel PCM from the PS5 gets really weird level anomalies when it’s set to 7.1, but 5.1 is fine. It does work with a Denon AVR with eARC, but unfortunately full speaker-based Atmos isn’t happening in the room I’ve got available.

tl;dr eARC is terrible, whether by the nature of the standard, or by inconsistent/broken implementation of the standard

For the stuff that matters, I had to connect to my receiver then to the TV. It doesn’t help that DTS isn’t supported by my TV (LG-CX). I have a Denon AVR as well.

So basically, almost everything goes through the receiver: nvidia shield, Blu-ray player. But then again, I paid through the nose for it.

It makes more sense to me that the sound capable device is better at figuring out the audio stuff. Which means the ports to a sound bar/receiver is a real consideration.

Haven’t figured out PC audio to my receiver though. I’ve basically given up.

> Haven’t figured out PC audio to my receiver though. I’ve basically given up.

While most motherboards do not have s/pdif connectors, most of them has pins on the board itself. Check out the manual of your mobo. If it has, you can use an s/pdif backplate, or a makeshift coax cable to hook it up to the receiver.

This is usually the best and cheapest way to get clear digital sound signal out of the PC case, and you can even pass through DTS and the likes.

S/PDIF sucks all the asses out there due to terrible software support.

The source of the content you want to watch has to have support for it, the support has to actually work and it has to have a compatible audio track (or be able and willing to convert). Right now that means basically no streaming services or games, very select TVs actually output multichannel audio over S/PDIF.

(Gonna ignore the rare possibility that your sound card manufacturer has paid for the license to be able to transcode all audio)

Yeah that’s half the reason I went with Sony over LG, Sony still pays for a DTS license. My favorite part of this whole thing is how Atmos can be either Dolby Digital Plus with metadata, Dolby TrueHD with metadata, or Dolby MAT, which is just a PCM stream with metadata. The latter being what Xbox and Apple TV use.

Also yes, from what I’ve read trying to get PC audio into an AVR in any sort of predictable fashion will drive you to an asylum.

For PC audio into an AVR I have a fake HDMI second screen set to clone the main monitor. Sometimes vsync chooses the HDMI port at 60Hz instead of my main monitor at 120Hz, but for the most part it works.

That’s a TV problem, and most manufacturers still just treat them like car radios and develop a generic UI, which they’ll rarely update, and Android thrown in for convenience

My left/right analog signal cable pair topology has been going strong for decades.

Multichannel audio when you try to use official means is so awful that it makes me laugh. It's like they don't want you using it considering the amount of hoops you have to hop through.

From personal experience you might encounter how:

* Your PC is not "certified"

* You haven't installed some (potentially paid) extension

* You have the extension but it isn't picked up by the streaming service

* Your streaming service doesn't support your OS

* Your media player can't do passtrough

* Your media player can do passtrough but nothing else on your system can (e.g. games)

* Your soundcard manufacturer didn't pay for the license to allow the previous point (and your OS's audio stack is too legacy to hack it in)

* Your media player can't downmix properly

* The cable you have is incompatible

* The cable you have is too compatible (causing the wrong output to be picked automatically)

* Your GPU drivers are wrong

* The default sampling rate of your sound card causes occasional crackling

* Your TV can't proxy audio from some inputs to external speakers

* Your TV doesn't recognize some formats from some inputs

* Your TV can't downmix

I *wish* I were kidding, it really is that bad.

In the end you pirate your content and output analog 5.1 straight to the speakers, it's cheaper, easier and significantly more reliable.

TVs are terrible for handling audio. Either internally or via ARC/eARC. Not only in terms of codecs but also sync, surround, etc.

You best bet is buying a dedicated HT receiver and plugging your video sources into it (ATV, Nvidia, BluRay, etc).

It's worth noting the ATV does not have HDMI audio passthrough and the latest version has a ton of issues with Atmos:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253553714

https://www.martinloganowners.com/threads/2021-new-gen-apple...

Like with many things in my lifetime I think perfection was achieved in this area at least a couple of decades ago. As the article states, nobody actually cared whether a DVD had Dolby or DTS on it. There was this perception that DTS must have been higher quality, so you'd imagine it was (and often the DTS version sounded louder due to calibration issues).

Our relentless insistence on progression has led to gimmicks like Dolby Atmos. It really doesn't add much of value to anything. It's just a new logo to put on cheap plastic soundbars that will be in landfills in a decade.

When you watch movies from the early days of Dolby Digital in the 80s you can tell that progress has been made since then. But watch a movie from the early 2000s and it will sound just like one today. In fact, they often sound better. Examples are Lord of the Rings, Spider-man 2 and War of the Worlds.

Why can't we just be happy?

I worked in the Cinema industry when Dolby Atmos were introduced. It was a pretty big upgrade and quality assurance for each auditorium were strict. Speakers had to be installed all over the roof and more speakers had to be added all around the auditorium. So in a Cinema Atmos can be pretty great, but how you can translate this to a home theatre setting is beyond me.

You translate it by using Dolby Atmos setup (which people are doing for a few years now and is available at home as well).

For cheap setups, people bounce sound off the ceiling while for better setups people install speakers into the ceiling. Automatic speaker calibration for a given room is pretty much a standard feature on AVRs today so that part is also taken care off. It's not quite the same as cinema, but there's still a massive market for people that want more than farting out of cheap phone speakers.

My setup is FAR from cheap: DENON 13 channel AVR, Monitor Audios all round, and KEF upfiring Atmos, all in a nice 7.1.4 setup (with a 100" projected image).

I went with upfiring, as I didn't want to hack loads of holes in the original ceiling of my 90 year old house. Yeah they are not as good as in-ceiling speakers, but I wouldn't say upfiring is always for 'cheap setups' - sometimes you have to just live with the restrictions you have.

Ah, sure, I didn't mean "cheap" as in "low quality" but more cheap in terms of "don't need to hire builders to drill holes in your ceiling".

(I'm using upfiring system as well due to same restrictions :D )

How were installs like this calibrated? How are home installs calibrated, for that matter? Open source solutions/recommendations especially appreciated.

My denon receiver comes with a microphone and an integrated calibration tool

For home installs the AV Receiver driving the speakers comes with (usually a proprietary) function to calibrate based on your sitting position.

I'm not sure if there's many opensource solutions - the quality of autocalibration is a big differentiating feature between AVR OEMs.

Check out Duff Room Correction for an old school open source option. There's also Room EQ Wizard, but that is not open source.

In high end home theaters there were proprietary installer tools like JBL's ARCOS (which I worked on). And there are pro calibration tools like Smaart.

In any case it's some combination of measurement, gain calibration, delay compensation, and generation of FIR or IIR filters to control frequency and phase response. Followed by subjective tweaking by the installer. Plus maybe some secret sauce for various things in the proprietary algorithms.

“The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray connected to the TV with the audio passed through the ARC/eARC. However the vast majority of TV companies do not support this on the ARC/eARC.”

What about people who watch movies that they have downloaded (or ripped from a DVD/Blu-Ray) directly on the TV? I suppose that would produce whatever audio format the DVD had without the need of ARC/eARC, right?

In my experience, my TV transcodes dts to whatever it wants to output.

Great article, but that was probably the worst experience I’ve ever had on mobile reading an article. Page kept sporadically reloading and jumping back to the top. Seemingly if I scrolled down in the wrong manner or clicked something it would trigger a reload or jump to the top. What a dumpster fire of a website.

I had DTS and Dolby receievers for about 15 years and no longer do, so I guess for me some of it just doesn't matter. We did surround with DVD + Blu-Ray for a while and then kind of stopped caring about it.

The thing I miss the most was I had a few DTS CDs that were amazing for surround sound music experience. I have yet to hear anything out of Apple's Spatial Audio that comes anywhere close to what those DTS CDs sounded like.

But DTS CDs were so ridiculously rare it was pointless.. I only had 2. I have a DTS surround copy of "What's New" by Dave Brubeck and I had a DTS surround recording of Holst's "The Planets". And I only ever had one CD player that could decode them. The DTS receivers required a DTS aware CD player to decode it and send a DTS stream. They couldn't take a raw bitstream and figure out it was DTS.

If you rip them to wav/flac, Kodi will decode dts properly.

I also believe ffmpeg will convert them to a proper 5.1 flac/wav.

I was on the bus this week, listening to a podcast on my AirPods Pro in “transparent” mode. I switched to some music and flipped to noise canceling mode. I’d forgotten all about turning on spacial audio, but I’ve gotta say, it was magical. The entire world went silent, except for the music coming from my phone I was holding in front of me. Even when I turned my head, the sound was coming from the phone. I had to convince myself that I wasn’t being “that guy” and listening to music on speakers in public. The only giveaway was that the sound quality was too good for that.

I’m won over. The listening experience was astonishingly good. IMO it’s not a replacement for a good surround setup in your own living room, can be mind blowing when out and about.

I had exactly the same experience and had to convince myself I was wearing headphones. This came at a time when I had no idea that the feature existed.

Wild, isn't it? I probably looked odd, moving my head around while giving my phone the side-eye.

This whole discussion here is somewhat weird because everyone keeps thinking about shitty soundbars and headphones. Dolby Atmos and DTS:X on a home cinema system with decent and large speakers is amazing and noticably different than simple non-object based surround systems

Is your username a reference to dts:x?

I assumed there was a good speaker setup connected to the tv in my roommates' house when I lived there. Turned out to just be a soundbar, maybe a sub too. People rail against these things but they seem great for being so compact to me.

That is honestly the problem with “home theater”. You have to have just the right space for them.

Gotta have the TV in the right space.

Gotta have the right room shape to accommodate read speakers.

With atoms you have to even have space for those “upper” speakers.

It’s rare to have a room in a house that not has the right floor plan for such installs. If your TV goes anywhere but exactly one place it becomes very hard to install “correctly”.

Somehow we’ve managed 5.1 in our apartment. I’ve seen a 6.1 properly set up. But most of the time I see fancy receivers pumping out 2.1 because their room simply doesn’t have accommodations for properly placed rear speakers.

I dunno. I guess my point is that most people really don’t have the floor plan for a 5.1 setup. And for those that do, many simply have no desire to set it up.

It’s still cool though!

> I realised there was no DTS support listed for the Panorama 3. ...

> “The reason for this is that DTS is not used by any of the streaming service companies and therefore is limited to people watching DVD/Blu-ray

It's kind of ironic, that after years of Sonos users asking the company "Where's the DTS on our expensive soundbars? Come on, this is an expensive set of allegedly smart kit, why aren't you doing it?", Sonos very recently released support.

Right when it's on the decline.

"'Most seem to theorise that it’s this dedication to quality, resulting in file size or high bandwidth requirements that makes [DTS] far less suitable for the low-bandwidth streaming world of highly compressed and efficient audio delivery required by all streaming services.'"

And there's the meat of it. Streaming has been a near inevitability and it seems DTS is >5 years too late to be thinking about bandwidth requirements.

> The only real difference is that the aspect ratio of the film may change during some specific ‘Enhanced’ sections. To my mind that’s a mockery of being “as the director intended”; one must surely doubt that a director would choose to switch ratios mid-movie (unless part of the film design, a la Oliver Stone, say, or the extraordinary genre-busting Spiderman into the Spiderverse).

It is not unheard of for newer films to have specific scenes that were shot in IMAX (and for those scenes to change aspect ratio accordingly when presented in an IMAX theater). One of the first search results on the topic:

https://www.avforums.com/threads/aspect-ratio-changing-durin...

Wikipedia goes more in depth on specific films and the amount of IMAX time in each:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMAX#Feature_films

As shooting in IMAX is expensive and difficult, we can presume this to be the director's intent.

It's not just IMAX either, some directors change mid film for aesthetic reasons.

Natural Born Killers comes to mind

On a tangent, wondering "but what about thx?": TIL that THX is orthogonal to the compression/transport format and is about measuring and adjusting the movie theatre audio to better and "well enough" match the recording studio characteristics.

DTS needs to work that Sony relationship and convince them to convert their surround format to DTS:X. Maybe even allow it for free just to keep their format alive.

The current PS5 3D-audio solution is good only for headphones. They have a "virtual" height option for stereo speakers, but it released to terrible reviews. No 7.1 virtual height speakers, though that's also supposedly in the works. I'm not optimistic it will be any better. Those who invest in good audio setups don't want it either way.

Give us proper 3D audio Sony, this is something Microsoft has had since 2017.

I’m still stuck with a 5.1 system at the moment. But no matter because streaming sucks ass. It makes no difference if it’s Dolby or DTS: streaming “Atmos” is on top of shitty compressed DD++. If I like a movie enough I’ll get it on Blu-ray. Some them have 18Mbit just for audio. If I had the cash I’d get Kaliedescape.

I have to say, Dolby Atmos in a certified theater, with a good seating position, is quite fantastic. Not sure you would get the same effect at home without a 64 speaker array and proper room treatment... but hey

Meanwhile, no model of Chromecast seems to support even playing back Netflix in 5.1.

All of them support that in fact, no need to make things up. They send Dolby Digital / Dolby Digital+ (AC3/EAC3) signal via HDMI.

They just don’t support Dolby TrueHD or 5.1 PCM

Yes, people keep saying this. I have run several models of Chromecast with Netflix direct to receiver units, through newer HDMI cable, into my very nice splitter box which will give me 7.1 analog outputs...it doesn't work.

It is specifically the Chromecast, because my Sony Blu-Ray player can do it just fine without so much BS. Near as I can tell, the Chromecasts manage to completely evade outputting anything useful and this is a well-reported problem.

At this point, I have no idea what signal they imagine they send, but somehow it's never any of the rather diverse set I can receive.

I had the same problem with a Roku. The Roku claims to support 5.1 passthrough, but in every conceivable hardware and settings page configuration it only outputs stereo for all the streaming services, even if the movie shows "5.1" on the purchase screen.

This includes trying a fully HDCP and Dolby licensed AVR, or a splitter like you mentioned, etc.

> At this point, I have no idea what signal they imagine they send, but somehow it's never any of the rather diverse set I can receive.

I'm pretty sure they imagine to send the signal that's specified in the specs and I mentioned - Netflix/Prime use a Dolby Digital+ (EAC3) stream which gets output from the Chromecast and your box most likely doesn't support.

Not sure what your BR player can do, but it most likely doesn't send that.

Complaning that Chromecast doesn't support outputting a signal in a format compatible with your other hardware is fine, but that does not mean it doesn't support 5.1 output at all.

That support is very likely very limited and it's easy to stumble upon something in your setup that makes it not work. I know for a fact that some TV's can't send received DD+ audio from HDMI to an external speaker setup. So... DD+ on crappy internal TV speakers is "support"?

Let's also please avoid the discussion how people should have had done more research before their purchase(s), it's not like any of this is properly documented.

Yes, sending 5.1 audio stream to your DD+ stream to your TV _is_ support (and for example, will work with pretty much every DD+ supporting AVR out there). The fact that your TV then destroys it cannot be an issue with the original hardware no matter how much you want to hedge on it in your last sentence.

Chromecast can't change the fact that your TV messes up the signal.

I didn't say it wasn't support, I said it's limited. Not to mention there are use-cases like projectors, where such a limitation is even more likely to exist.

It is an issue with the original hardware to rely on something it can't detect and doesn't have fallbacks for. Chromecast can absolutely change what physical outputs it offers.

Say instead of talking about relying on DD+ passthrough, it lacked the support for YCbCr 4:2:2 and required RGB 8:8:8 from all displays, then that too would be something Chromecast does wrong.

I am not in these markets and certainly don't understand the finer details, or major ones like "Xperi needs X license purchases to survive as a company", so I'm putting this out there at that level -- please correct me where I'm being naive, if you feel the need[0]. :)

There's always been a pretty solid few "categories" of products in this space. There's my Mom and Dad, who purchased a sound bar for the place up north because the TV speakers were terrible and the room acoustics were so bad you couldn't understand anything said[1] and it does rain up there, sometimes. There's "I want reasonable surround sound" guys who buy higher-end sound bars/lower end all-in-one 5.1 set ups. There's the guys like me who went through the trouble of setting up the room, perfectly, and purchased a mid-range AVR, solid TV, and higher-end speakers[2], and the "Reference Folks" -- all premium, high-end, obsess about aspects beyond the speakers/devices/cables to "wall coatings, double dry-wall, sound insulation, etc, etc."

There's several categories in-between those, but everyone above me absolutely cares about having that track and will pay extra for it. Depending on the set up, it wasn't (probably still isn't at some level) uncommon for folks like this to have a separate component for decoding specific audio tracks sending the decoded result of each channel separately to the amp, which did nothing but what it's name suggests. There's a world where DTS can continue to exist for these folks. They're still consumers of Blu-Ray discs, or have Plex servers with uncompressed versions of things, for the same reasons -- streaming service audio and video isn't as good. It sounds like they were already trying to position themselves as "the higher-end", which was a far better value proposition before streaming platforms took over, now that market is much more niche.

I, similarly, didn't know about streaming platforms not supporting DTS. Frankly, since having kids, I pay a lot less attention to that space. I'm surprised the benefits of delivering the DTS (reasonably compressed, but DVD quality) track don't outweigh the extra size. These aren't small files and video is most of it, but I'd take a small hit there for some movies in my collection to hear the DTS audio. Adding to the file size a bit is certainly something I'd like to see; I'd probably pay a buck more a month for it if a "Premium Streaming" option were available -- well, I would have in the past. I guess the issue they face is that there's nothing particularly special about the DTS sound track these days[3]. Is there no technical benefit between DTS:X and Dolby Atmos? I sounds like DTS supports more speakers.

Outside of streaming video, does it matter for gaming? It seems like if my console could output a DTS:X signal to my AVR, assuming my AVR supported it, I could setup 32 speakers (and pretend I could tell the difference between that and, say, 9), but I'm know there's people who would care if that exists. I know my Xbox S can output some compressed formats to my AVR, I'm not sure if DTS:X is among them, but there are those who would pay for that ability, delivered by software (if MS isn't doing that already).

So, not taking into account whether or not Xperi could survive the smaller -- high-end only -- market or not (it's a pretty big space), having support for a better audio codec for just the uses of "discs/Plex" and non-video is going to rank higher than most of the trivialities I've seen hundreds dropped on by people in the high-end home theater/audio space[4]. Maybe that means cranking up the licensing fees, and my category of owner no longer has the next generation's DTS creation available to it. It also probably matters a lot less to me in that category because the sound quality of the DD:Atmos tracks that I've heard have all been on the great side. Once it passes a certain threshold, people in my category don't care about it -- our other equipment probably doesn't support some of the things DTS:X provides that DD:Atmos doesn't (my AVR handles 9.1 speakers in various configurations, max).

[0] Kindly, preferably, I won't hold you to it.

[1] It amplified deep all the way through mid-range, but just below an average woman's voice, so if soundtrack sounds, noise/effects, or a man's voice would be 10-20% louder than a woman's. We needed some dampening panels but it's a lake house, main floor -- all windows except for the one spot it makes sense to put a TV.

[2] Or even "purchased speakers they had to buy one by one, separately", since most of the companies requiring you to do that at least partly because it's hard to sell integrated 7.1/5.1 sets in the $3,000+ range.

[3] Maybe there never was, but the DTS tracks on some movies have bullets that fly through me whereas the DD tracks they wouldn't leave the center speaker. I've heard many, perfect DD tracks, but among my collection I have several examples where the DTS track sounds perfect and the DD track sounds like up-mixed stereo, and a small handful where the DD track is great ... provided you don't listen to the DTS track, where everything is just a little wider, particularly in the back, and it makes everything kind of "line up" better -- a guy runs past the camera and the footsteps come from behind just to the right, whereas the character goes through you on the DD side. It also seemed as though the DTS tracks engage the LFE parts. I have an old-school piston ButtKicker under my couch, we feel that, and when that part is off, it wrecks the experience of some movies for us (my favorite being sending some of the notes from a sound-track's bass guitar into LFE where it over-powers everything else going on). I have only anecdata, I'll admit, though.

[4] I'm just jealous -- very happy with the sound of my own system, but I know a few people who obsess and spend a lot of money, constantly tweaking/upgrading their Home Theater space and when you hear the same movie played on their perfect system, you come home and it briefly makes your system sound like the speakers are empty soup cans connected by rope to the receiver.

Is Dolby Atmos that thing that comes with Windows that you enable and the sound starts sucking really bad?

Possibly, but that might also be a windows/device thing because Dolby Atmos tracks I listen to on my Apple Music/iPhone sound _Amazing_

Dolby Atmos on Apple Music is an interesting case, because there are more stringent requirements for the published mix. Personally, I don't think I've noticed anything regarding the positional data, but the songs tend to sound better because they're mixed better.

I think it's the company that shits on the cinema movie viewing experience by spamming before every movie.

Yeah what's up with the 20 minutes of what are basically commercials in the beginning of every cinema-shown film? We pay ticket prices to get commercials? Cinema is archaic in some ways...

would you pay twice or 3x the ticket price for no commercials? I wouldn't. really, I don't mind the previews as part of the experience anyway.

This enabled itself after an update a few years ago and I thought my headphones had broken.

I believe that's Windows Sonic for Headphones.

As mentioned in another comment, Windows Sonic is the default spatial implementation provided with Windows by default. There are also paid Dolby Atmos and DTS plugins available through the Microsoft Store where licenses may be included dependent on your hardware or OEM, e.g. my Logitech Gaming Pro X includes a license for the DTS plugin.

Personally I do like the Dolby Atmos plugin, I have my computer connected to a TV with sound passed via eARC to my soundbar. However, if you're consuming Film/TV with such a setup, you probably just want to enable Dolby/DTS passthrough instead.

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