Interesting article.
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Good article.
“Effectively over” is a weird way to put it in 2022. The fighters have left and the janitor is mopping the ring.
Dolby had the important markets captured years ago. AC3 is mandatory for DVD and ATSC. Today they’ve won the mindshare competition for HDR branding.
If a manufacturer has to deal with Dolby anyway, and it’s “good enough”, why also bother with DTS?
It was really surprising that Sonos added (non-object) DTS last year. I’d love to know what motivated that - DTS patents expiring? DTS decided to negotiate better? Or did Sonos decide it was a worthwhile addition?
DTS expressed that higher bit rates brought better sound. However when Sony is involved - they do their best to make it all proprietary, and weird.
All it ever did was confuse everyone who ever built a media server to the point the one device in my house that will play a movie file and passthrough DTS-MA is my ancient WD TV Live that has two settings, passthrough and decode.
Some day people that build media servers will do the same…
Given the mainstream market doesn’t care about quality I guess its not a surprise that DTS has had trouble in the current home market.
I’ve never heard any DTS based soundtrack that is better, or worse, than dolby.
With the majority of people who listen through their TV, or soundbar, it would be impossible for the average consumer to tell the difference from either format if otherwise mastered/mixed exactly the same.
So even if you could show me ABX testing that DTS is audibly superior, it wouldn’t matter for the majority.
Truth is it is difficult for 99.995% of the entire population to hear any difference in any of the formats.
DTS, AC3 EAC, AAC, nor the difference between 5.1 and 7.1
The dirty secret is just about all of that becomes pretty pointless in the average home where the room is not set up to even make it possible to hear the difference, acoustics matter!
I read an article where pro sound engineers in a sound room TRIED to discern the difference between full bit rate AC3 vs full bit rate AAC, even with a trained ear and the right equipment they could BARELY tell the difference. Fun fact AC3 actually edged out as better on quality in the ranges people typically experience sound in.
On a tangent most people cannot tell the difference between a quality 1080p and 4k, this is because they typically do not have the right TV size set for the right viewing distance. Also, most do not know what to look for to see the difference.
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Never mind.
