Understanding the Surround Sound Formats
Surround sound is integral to the home theater experience. However, the various surround sound formats available on modern AV receivers can be confusing. Sony DTS HD Home Theater Receivers pack a number of audio processing modes for you to choose from. Choosing the correct surround mode for your movie or TV show is important for unlocking the potential of your home theater system
What Are the Different Surround Sound Formats?
- Dolby Atmos: Dolby Atmos is surround sound encoding format that aims to provide a completely immersive surround listening experience. It provides up to 64-channels of surround sound by combining front, side, rear, back, and overhead speakers. This surround sound format is available on select Blu-ray and Ultra HD Blu-ray Disc releases and provides several speaker setup options.
- Dolby Digital: Also known as 5.1 channel surround system, is a digital encoding system for audio signals that can decode via a receiver or preamplifier with a Dolby Digital decoder. However, the term "Dolby Digital" does not refer to how many channels it has but the digital encoding of the audio signal.
- DTS: Also referred to as DTS Digital Surround, is a 5.1 channel encoding and decoding surround sound format just like the Dolby Digital 5.1 only that DTS uses less compression in the encoding process. To access DTS encoded information on CDs and DVDs, you must have a home theater receiver or preamplifier with a built-in DTS decoder, as well as a CD and/or DVD player with DTS pass-through.
You will realize that some of the processing modes on your AV receiver are only available for certain types of input, in other words for PCM/analog stereo inputs or for Dolby Digital/DTS multichannel inputs.
What Connection Options Can I Use in Order to Take Full Advantage of the New Codecs?
The new audio codecs include Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD, PCM (uncompressed lossless audio), and DTS-HD HR. Here are the three options
- HDMI: If your TV and AV receiver are ARC-enabled, you’re not only able to use an optical or coaxial cable but a HDMI cable to be able to play the TV audio through the receiver.
- HDMI 1.3: This has the ability to carry compressed audio (bitstream). If you have the latest AV receiver with this connection option, you can set your player to send the compressed signal to it and let it do the heavy work.
- Analog cables: In addition to digital connectivity, home theater receivers offer analog connectivity, which is for multichannel output in case you dont have a HDMI cable.
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