i hesitate...but the truth is, i have never been a fan of dolby labs. in the days of cassette tapes, i chose to tolerate the hiss rather than engage dolby noise reduction (the saddest excuse for nr ever).

then there was dolby pro logic. 5 channel stereo mode was better than this joke of a format.

then came dolby digital. thank goodness digital theater systems (which is a hiher res format) came along. otherwise, i think dolby would have milked pro logic for years longer.

the fact is, dolby labs is concerned with market share and profits. they have never, to my knowledge, been concerned with the quality of music to the end user (me and you) more than being the biggest.

for example...bob carver's autocorrelator in the early seventies was vastly better noise reduction than dnr, but who heard it to compare?

when you are as big a company as dolby, you can offer less and advertise it as more and get away with it.

dts 5.1 music only cd's led to dvd-a and sacd. dolby doesn't care about music only formats, or did anyone hear that they will soon announce their version of a high-res music only format? PL II is only to keep shelf space with dts' neo processing modes.

every company that wishes to bring a prepro to market has to deal with dolby labs, lucasfilms ltd. (whom dolby has joined with for thx ex, which is the same format as dd ex), digital theater systems, and now cirrus logic.

every chip encorporated to decode these formats carries license fees and complex paperwork, which is why the prepros are so expensive. most asian electronics companies won't offer to build one oem for this reason.
(outlaw, of course has done it through a malaysian manufacturer against all odds, i think, and at a very low street price. that's why i laud them and own a 950). my point is, dolby will employ every trick they've learned over the years to own the lion's share of these fees.

dts is owned by spielberg, katzenberg and geffen, so they could encode the movies they produced or believe me, they never could have gotten dts off the ground.

PL II is nothing more than PL with full range signal to the surrounds, or, keeping a dead format alive to nettle dts.

we all would have received our 950 a long time ago were it not for dpl II. it should really have been the mode for pro logic, but back then dolby had no competition, and so, released it as we all know it to be now...really a bad format.

i don't listen to pro logic II. it's my silent protest. forgive my rant.