Well, hey, I think we're both going around in circles now. And I think we're saying a lot of the same things: DTS-ES discrete would have been better if the rear channel had not been summed into the two surround channels.

Since it's not easy to make a direct comparison (know of any disks that are encoded in both matrix and discrete?) this is kind of theoretical.

I guess DTS really couldn't have done it any other way, though; in order for discrete tracks to play back on older hardware already out in the field, they had to make it backwards compatible. So, to avoid losing information in the stream, they had to sum the rear channel into the surrounds.

What they really should have done is anticipate this situation and gone 6.1 from the beginning. They could have had 5.1 systems do a downmix. But they didn't.

Oh well.

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net