Hi everyone, I have written about the work-arounds I have used to dealt with DTS (for the PlayBar at the time:
and DTS-HD for the Arc:
Since the Arc now supports multi-channel LPCM (only through eArc), I am thinking of converting all the DTS-HD tracks to LPCM. I would welcome any thoughts or knowledge on this topic from other users!!
The reason I want to do this is, as per my thread above, the best work-around I found was converting all DTS-HD tracks to Dolby Digital Plus (E-AC3) 970kbps, which was the highest quality of sound I could get the Arc to play in DD+.
For these conversions, I used Make MKV to digitise my discs and then use XMedia Recode to add a new default audio track for every DTS-HD sound track, which was DD+. I retained the DTS-HD track as second audio track so each movie had the original audio.
Anyway, I have tested this using LPCM as the primary track instead. In comparison to the DD+ tracks:
- There appears to be no bitrate limitation -- so at least from a data point of view, the LPCM makes a lossless copy of the DTS-HD track
- The tracks are about 30% larger in size compared to DTS-HD (which makes sense as they are not compressed in LPCM)
- They play perfectly fine on the Arc
- But LPCM is much much quieter. I can’t figure out if the “quality” is lower, I can say for sure the volume is some 30% lower. I don’t know what the reason is.
I noticed that many people have complained that LPCM is much quieter, so this may be a firmware/software issue with Sonos equipment…
Despite the low volume, I think I will proceed in the hope that this issue will be sorted out later. I can’t imagine that DD+ would be better in terms of audio quality than LPCM. Thoughts welcome!!
