[Soli]

Use your ears and experience to make judgments....

I understand that the average Joe can't distinguish the diference between Peak watts and RMS watts and unfortunalty most of them ends buying the latest low quality HTIB due some well implemented marketing.. thats a shame because with a little more money they would get a enjoyable home cinema for many years.

From my experience any 400$ entry-level AV receiver + small satellites like the Kef 3005 5.1 or the Monitor audio mass 5.1 (800$) is sufficient to listen huge differences between the same track in DTS-HD and the DTS core from the same bluray Movie.

I could rent all my movies in the ATV3, more convenient at all, but is missing the lossless audio, dolby digital in cinema is not enough for me, there is not enough Bass, rumble, crispy sound, like im used to listen in the bluray track...
In the HD Audio track i can listen more with less volume and still hear all the details and surround sound separation, while in the DTS/DD track the is sound is much more confused with the treble being more aggressive at higher volumes...

For Music, i use the airplay from the ATV3 to listen Spotify from the smartphone app or the laptop...only because its convenience with enough quality.

Sorry for coming in a little late...
I think you are, excuse the expression, blowing steam up your own ass.

Here's some facts:

DTS (Core): On DVD it was not locked to 768kbs but varied between that to 1.5Mbs. On Blu-ray it's always 1.5Mbs. Since I doubt anyone watching DVD care all that much about "Hi-Res master audio etc", I'll assume that 1.5Mbs is the common denominator.

Dolby Digital: On Blu-ray it's always 640kbs. (Edit: wrong, it's mostly 640kbs but some are 448kbs. 448kbs isn't bad but isn't quite transparent under (almost) all circumstances)

Dolby Digital is more efficient than DTS, so DD 640kbs is very much capable at holdings it's own against DTS, even at 1.5Mb.

Now, the way multichannel compression codecs work is that they have a:
1) common bitpool for all the channels. What that mans is that even though the bitrate may be constant, the bitrate dedicated to the different channels is dynamic. That means that there are always enough bits to compress pretty much transparently.
2) Also you may heard of "joint stereo", in multcihannel codecs it works pretty much the same way. That means that if there is a big explosion that uses all the speakers at the same time, it doesn't really take up that much more space than if it was played on 1 speaker. And might even take less space since the codec then can throw out more ambient noises that you can' hear anyways.
3) The soundtrack of movies are very dynamic, giving the codecs the best conditions to compress most efficiently. For instance, the center channel is normaluized to an average -31db.

The worst case scenario would be playing 5 or 7 channels at the same time, where the sounds are TOTALLY different, draining the common bitpool and also reducing the efficiency of "joint stereo". This NEVER happens. Which in turns means that for all intents and purposes DTS [email protected] and DD @640kbs are more or less transparent.

You will NOT remotely hear any difference with a 400usd receiver. I have heard numerous of these receivers and no, it doesn't matter if the the receiver show DTS MSTR in the display or not. Personally I have audio gear worth something along crazy sums, and even I don't care if the sound is "lossless" or not.

Addendum: As for Netflix, they use both DD+@192kbs and DD@384kbs. Dolby says that DD+ is twice as efficient as DD. My personal opinion is that it's probably not twice as efficient, but I can't say for sure since I haven't compared directly. The good thing is that Netflix can't totally abandon DD@384kbs. They need this for it to be compatible with older receivers, so there will always be a way of getting DD@384kbs. (Although I've heard some talks about some devices transcoding DD+ to DD) But for streaming, this works well IMO. You want the best picture and sound, you buy Bluray UHD or something.