[skylarking]

DTS-HD and DTS-HD MA are the same thing aren't they?

DTS is a lossy format which was a late inclusion to the DVD standard and thus early players can't handle this format. This late DVD spec change provided a user selectable optional DTS audio format in addition to the mandatory and standard Dolby Digital mutlichannel audio. In theory, DTS gave listeners something better than the the standard DD but it's likely a differing points of view on how surround sound should be encoded and thus devolved to company PR. The DTS crowd believed surround channels should be directional whereas DD crowd believed they should be diffused... In theory either DTS or DD could be indistinguishable from the source material if the encoding was done at the highest bit rate.... but it never was, exept possibly on superbit DVD... Seems the pressure was to produce one disk for multiple markets and as such these disks contained less than ideal bitrates to accomodate the multiple languages...

Later the DTS crowd released enhancements to the DTS lossy core, primarily for use in BD disks, since these disks had more storage space to play with... The lossy core was kept for backward compatability and to that they added extensions that are used to recreate lossless multichannel audio. The decoder takes the core and the extension to produce the lossless tracks... So if you have old hardware, the extra stuff is simply ignored and you only got the lossy DTS (which could be indistinguishable from the source but was likley poorly encoded using lower bitrates)... If you had new hardware, the extra stuff is processed along with the DTS core so you get lossless multichannel sound (and again it would be indistingwishable from the source but again likely still poolry mastered and as such a faityhful reporduction crud)... Obviously your hardware must be able to process the corrct extension types (there are a number) to get the lossless multichannel sound...

DD on the other hand produced a non backward compatible standard which resulted in needing both DD and TrueHD tracks on BD disks... What this means is that if you rip your BD, you must keep both the DD and TrueHD tracks if you want to be able to play the rip on all equipment.

What the specific differences are between DTS-HD and DTS-HD MA are likely minor but i'd guess its small diffs in bitrates, number of channels, frequency range, intended media it's used on, timing of making it into certain standards, licencing, yada, yada, yada. In any case, too much is made of such stuff and is at odds with reality where quality of sound & video production takes a low priority. I have CD's where the produces have screwed up and swapped the left and right channels on their CD pressings yet people will argur whether MP3 @ some bitrate is better than some other standard at another bitrate when discussing encoding such CD's... And the same quality sound engineers likley worked with the movie studios...

Having said that, i'd do like to see the correct DTS-HD MA lamp on an amp but i'm getting over such obsessions as i simply remember that faithfully reproduced crap is still crap

What does make for frustration is when manufacturers are loose with terminology in an attempt to make a sale at the expecse of truth... Intel is such a manufacture that sprukes 4K video on their NUCs yet isn't clear that their boxes can't handle UHD, which is 4K video at upto 60HZ, since their boxes don't support HDMI v2. and HDCP v2. NVidia is also not clear about it's drivers as it uses fuzzy statements like "DTS-HD MA bitstreaming" when talking of "features" but says nothing about what decoding their drivers can actually do. Add such behavious across multiple vendors and it not surprising it's actually complex to build a HTPC as you can be deceptively misslead - you need to buy somthing to find out it doesn't work