Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA: Lossless or Not?

Everyone has an agenda. I freely acknowledge my own. My goal through my label, my digital download site and through these daily posts is to present my own personal view of high-end audio. I’ve been at this for a very long time and have some technical as well and creative knowledge when it comes to the things I talk about. Do I want this to help sell more of my recordings…absolutely. But I’m not going to spin the facts to enhance my personal financial position. That’s why any ads you might encounter on this site are there because I believe in the products.

But there are others that either don’t have the facts straight or are employed to “market” products that require a “reality check”. I’m sure you’re familiar with the strategy. I have a Linked In account and once in a while, I stop by to see some of the posting. Invariably, there are at least 6-10 sequential posts from the same person. They are always pithy quotes about how to run a business or how to succeed in life. I guess he believes it’s his job to issue the daily “fortune cookie” to all of circle just to stay relevant. It’s a turn off to me…and I can say that as long as I’ve known him, it’s been the same old thing. It just seems like he’s trying too hard.

Then there are others that insist on posting at every available site about their new product or service…and they do it by stretching the facts or being ignorant of them. Today, I noticed a post that seemed to imply that both Dolby TrueHD and DTS HA Master Audio are somehow unable to deliver great fidelity through an A/V receiver. The implication is that only PCM audio can accomplish that…and that you should buy their $300 box to keep things in the PCM format.

The author wrote, “…you are suspicious of the decoding/processing imposed by one of the two “lossless” compression codecs known as Dolby TrueHD and DTS MasterHD [sic the correct format name is DTS HD Master Audio].” He continues, “If these are cheap enough to include in a $299 AVR, how good can they be?”

They can be very good! In fact, both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HS MA are simply algorithms that are licensed by their respective owners and run on high-powered DSP chips in the A/V receivers. The same algorithm runs perfectly on an inexpensive unit or one costing thousands of dollars more. And the validity of the lossless nature of these encoding schemes is mandated to be perfect. In fact, the process requires a verification stage that doesn’t happen on uncompressed audio.

Dolby TrueHD is the current version of the old Meridian Lossless Packing [MLP] technology developed in the UK by Meridian back in the late 90s. I know those guys and they are some of the smartest DSP gurus in the world. After all, it was MLP that beat out all of the other companies when it was time to pick an algorithm for lossless coding scheme included in the DVD-Audio format.
This article tries to make the case for sticking with PCM audio and avoiding the “nasty” standard multichannel encoding schemes adopted by the Blu-ray Association (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio). In reality, whether you decode the lossless encoded datastream at the BD player (they have their own DSP decoding chips that run the licensed algorithms) or do it with an inexpensive box…the audio still got decoded from Dolby THD or DTS-HD MA. This is a perfect example of sales speak…and it’s time we recognized it as such.

There are a lot of better ways to spend $300…including getting an inexpensive A/V Receiver.