I bought a new Samsung TV (QN95B) and noticed at home that it doesn’t support DTS codes. So I couldn’t play any of my video files with DTS. Therefore I bought the Nvidia Shield since it supports DTS and I set my TV to audio passthrough.
My current setup us:
Plex on Nvidia Shield → connected via HDMI to my Samsung TV
Sonos Arc connected via HDMI eARC to Samsung TV
I have installed Plex on the Shield and I am fascinated about that app. I is brillian, it feels like a streaming system (but for my offline files)!
Now we come to my problem:
Unfortunately the TV cannot even passthrough DTS without a codec:(
However when I start a video file with DTSon my Shield using Plex, my Sonos received Dolby Digital Plus 2.0. Why does my Sonos get any sound at all?
Then I found the option “Dolby Processing” in the Shield advanced settings. After setting it to “off”, my Sonos received PCM MultiChannel 5.1. How does that work?
Is PCM 5.1 “real” surround sound?
Is it possible that Plex encodes all DTS codes directly to AC3?
Are there any other possibilities to get DTS to work with my setup?
Thank you very much for your hints! I am not an audio expert and during all my recherche I noticed that this is an extremely complicated topic.
If Plex can’t pass through a codec like TrueHD or DTS it will transcode those codecs to PCM 5.1 or 7.1, making an exact copy of the source. PCM is a lossless codec, and transcoding to it loses nothing. Multichannel PCM has been around for decades. So yes PCM 5.1 is real surround sound.
Plex would not normally transcode DTS to AC3 because encoding to AC3 is lossy. I read how that occurred in your post. So clearly it happened, but it may be easier to move beyond it rather than study an undesirable thing. Going to PCM is the most common transcode.
To always get the original sound codec like DTS sent to your speakers while the video goes to the TV is the whole point of an AVR.
So it sounds like you’re probably in excellent shape as is, using PCM when needed. Just make sure to use the best cables. Ultra High Speed HDMI certified cables are as cheap as slower ones.
thank you for your explanations. During my internet recherche I read that PCM is a stereo format and that’s why I was wondering now about PCM 5.1. Is it the same as LPCM?
When PCM is a lossless format, where is then the advantage of DTS-HD and TrueHD for example?
PCM and LPCM are the same thing. It’s a waste of an L
The advantage over PCM is size. PCM is uncompressed. All those other codecs are ways to compress PCM audio, and the best ones compress it losslessly.
Nowadays Dolby Atmos and DTS-X are object oriented compression / decompression (codec) schemes. Those should be passed to the AVR or Atmos capable soundbar imo, not mapped into PCM to fully benefit from them.
