does dts play and is it 5.1 sound?

 

Yes to both.

 

What exactly is DTS?

 

I believe it stands for Digital Theater Systems and it competes with Dolby Digital. It's a surround-sound format. Each one has its proponents but Dolby Digital is more common in movie theaters and in home-theater support for a variety of reasons.

 

www.dtsonline.com

 

I have Police Syncronicity which is DTS. Plays fine. Good sound.

 

I have two DTS discs for the car so far, Wings' "Venus and Mars" and Brian Wilson's "Imagination." The surround effects are especially notable on "Imagination" given Brian Wilson's style of multi-layered background vocals.

 

DTS plays and sounds great, even better than some DVDAs

 

Be careful though. I have one DVD-A disc (can't remember which one) that says it's DTS, but in the fine print, it states that the DTS only works when played in a home DVD player, and that DVD-A players will only play standard (non-DTS) 5.1 surround. This is confirmed by the fact that the TL does not recognize it as a DTS disc. Seems pretty sneaky to me... not to mention

 

IMO, some DTS good, some DTS bad. I own about 10 DTS discs and only one is really good (Eagles-Hell Freezes Over). I was very disappointed with both Wings DTS discs, not because of content, but because they were not high rez. That is where DVD-A really shines, whether the content is 5.1 or stereo (although 5.1 is much more fun). I enjoyed Santana-Abraxas in DTS, but if it were high rez, it would be awesome.
Having said this, it's also true that some DVD-As really bite. However, in general, I think DVD-As are by far the better format. In fact, I am not even sure that any more discs are being released in DTS format without having a DVD-A component, as well.

 

when is dark side of the moon coming out on dvd a? I would think this would be so attractive?

 

"Dark Side of the Moon" was originally slated for DVD-A, however the higher ups at Sony convinced Capitol to release it on SACD, even though every other HiRez release that Capitol had done was a DVD-A. The amount of $$$ thrown at Capitol by Sony was way too much to pass up.

Consequently, you won't be seeing any Pink Floyd on DVD-A for some time.

If you have the right equipment, you can create a 5.1 or 4.0 DVD-A of DSOTM from the SACD or the '70s quad LP/Q8 by playing the music into your PC with a 4 or 6 channel sound card, then taking the mono wav files for each channel and using DiscWelder or WaveLab5 to create a DVD-A.

Bummer, if you ask me......

:-jon

 

Why does our stereo have the logo for "DTS" on it then?
I did catch the fine print on the back of a DVD A disc, that had DTS, and it did say, its only good in the DVD Video players... Very..




DTS by the way stands for Digital Theater Sound.

 

The TL will recognize the DTS track, however you have to change groups. The TL is compatible with DTS CDs and DVD-A's with DTS tracks. It will, however, always default to group one on a DVD-A, which is the hirez surround track

 

wouldnt the DVD-A track be 5.1 also?

 

Yes - the hirez surround track is 5.1!

Most DVD-A's have:

HiRez Surround track
*HiRez Stereo Track (these are the "real" DVD-A tracks)

Many DVD-A's also have the following DVD-V audio tracks

*DTS
*Dolby Digital

The TL will play the DTS, but not the DD

* - To get to these tracks, you must use the "group" selector.

 

DTS is available on some DVD-A discs played through a DVD-A player (as a DVD Audio disc), but not on others. My point was that not all DVD-A discs that claim DTS will be recognized, because some of them get sneaky and make the DTS available only when the DVD is played as a DVD Video disc, not as a DVD Audio disc. Of course, IF they mention the difference, it's in the fine print on the back. Of course, that doesn't stop them from splashing the DTS logo all over the front of the package.

How, exactly, do you do that? If you can select a different track, then that may make my prior warning moot, or at least make the discs that can't be recognized as DTS a lot less common.

 

I have it. Converted from SACD (analog).

Mike

 

Ok, this is not as big a deal as you all think. First of all, nobody is being sneaky here. There are three types of media zones possible on a DVD disc, Video Zone (mostly what you buy movies on; Allows Video with Dolby, DTS, PCM or MPEG audio), Audio Zone (MLP & PCM audio only, no video, however still pictures are allowed) and ROM (which allows computer playable data).

Most DVD-Audio discs on the market today have both Audio and Video zones, with 5.1 MLP in the Audio zone and PCM stereo and/or Dolby or DTS in the Video Zone. A standard DVD-Video player cannot play the Audio zone, and a simple DVD-Audio player will not play the video zone. However, most DVD-Audio players on the market are Hybrid players that can play either zone. The Acura ELS is one such system and as such can play back DTS as well as MLP. It defaults to the first zone it sees which on a DVD-Audio disc must be by default the Audio zone, hence MLP playback. On a DTS CD, it plays back the DTS stream as that is the only thing available. It won't play a Video disc at all because it lacks video capability, which you would need to navigate the disc.

So hopefully you see that nobody is trying to prevent you from playing DTS, but that the default is MLP. By the way, there is no product on the market where the DTS stream is of higher quality than the MLP, so you aren't missing anything. The reason both MLP & DTS are included on many discs is so that the user can have a high-quality playback option no matter which player they own.

Hope this helps, ric

 

Not exactly right. The ELS system will not play back the video zone on a DVD media. If you don't have either MLP or LPCM in the Audio zone of your DVD, you won't hear anything from it. DTS is not supported in the Audio Zone per the DVD-A specification.

DTS-encoded CDs are packaged nearly identically to DVD-As and as a result the casual consumer can't tell the difference, so supporting DTS-encoded CDs was a wise move on Acura's part. The only media the ELS system will decode a DTS stream from is CD.

Mike