I forgot to mention an interesting comparison I attended several years ago. I was working on the film "True Lies" and the producers were trying to determine what audio formats to release the film in. A "shootout" was arranged where a reel of the movie "Terminator II" was submitted to Dolby for Dolby Digital encoding, and to DTS for DTS encoding. The reel of the film used was the one with the "nuclear nightmare" sequence.

The representatives from Dolby and DTS brought their endoded versions of the soundtrack to the dubbing stage, where the original 6 track magnetic master was also loaded on a mag reproducer. The reel of the movie was run with picture, and surprisingly nobody was able to tell the difference between either of the formats in relation to each other, or to the original 6 track master. The only thing I noted was that the DTS playback was "hissier" in the absence of signal. This was a really shocking demo, but considering we were listening to a reel of film that consisted mainly of either very soft foley effects or very loud "nuclear bomb" sound effects (and a "synthesized" music soundtrack), the results are not surprising.

I'm sure in this demo that DTS took great pains to ensure "accurate" encoding, otherwise the film's original mixing engineers (who were present) would spot the tinkering with the soundtrack immediately. All present at the demonstration were well aware of what the "artifacts" of lossy encoding sound like.


[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited February 26, 2003).]