Question about DTS-Hi Res vs Dts Master

Unless you run the exact same audio source into the encoder, you can get results where the lossless form uses less bits than a high bit rate lossy form.

DTS-HD MA is better since its lossless and not lossy.
I have the encoder suite studios use to encode DTS-HD MA and DTS-HD HR etc.. and actually to encode DTS-HD HR after you choose your amount of channels and DTS-HD HR and input your wavs the choices for encode are just bitrates. In my opinion I see little point in using DTS-HD HR instead of DTS-HD MA since its lossless instead of lossy and uses little more bitrate.

The bitrate of losslessly compressed audio has nothing to do with its quality. It is only an indicator of the material's complexity.

I doubt there's going to be any audible difference between the two.

Can you really tell the difference between the HR track and the MA track?

True that.

DTS-HD MA is lossless packing. DTS-HD HRA is hi-rez lossy compression. Nothing more complicated than that.

It seems at the 2Mbps mark the lossless MA encode is virtually identical to the lossy HR for 5.1 16/48.

House of Flying Daggers: Mandarin track

LPCM (US) 4608 kbps
dts-HD HR (Aus) 2046 kbps
dts-HD HR (Fr) 2046 kbps
dts-HD MA (TW) 2047 kbps

Perhaps if people doing encodes like the above realise this they would have chosen MA instead.

Sorry for the necropost but I think people are forgetting some valid points here. First off I want to put a disclaimer, I am not a professional I just read allot and I happen to have DTS Master Audio Suite and run allot of different types of experiments for the testing of audio codecs, transparency, efficiency, size, bandwidth, compatibility, etc.

DTS-HD High Resolution as of now is not just for smaller bit rates but for BANDWIDTH constraints! DTS Master even with a low AVERAGE bit rate the PEAK bit rate can be as high as 27mbps! If any of you have DTS MAS encoder run a high resolution PCM file (like 96khz/8 channels or 192khz/6 channels) then take a look at the peak bit rate graph and you will see that peak bit rate higher than DTS High Resolution can be sustained for a bit, combine that with multiple DTS Master tracks and you have a serious Bandwidth issue.

So yes DTS High res does have a place but it should have had a variable constrained bit rate (much like some forms of AAC) so 754 core with the extension being variable bit rate like DTS-MA but only up to say 2046, 2304, 2559, 3018, 4608kbps, etc. Variable bit rate can sometimes be rough for bandwidth constraints, very unpredictable. 96khz/24bit/8 channels in LPCM is a very high constant bit rate but DTS Master in tracks that consist of varying levels of activity correlating to high and low bit rates (simply put)...... Ill see if I can post some screenshots from my Master Audio encoder so you can take a look at bit rates, settings, etc.... DTS HR Bit rates and 8ch config.png 191k .png file DTS-HR_SampleRate.png 39k .png file
Edited by nateo200 - 6/17/12 at 5:42pm

We were talking specifically about movie audio tracks with 48kHz sample rates, not higher resolution. I very much doubt peak bit-rate causes a bandwidth issue. In the example I gave above, I doubt the peak bit-rate of the dts-HD MA could ever exceed that of the LPCM CBR at 4.6Mbps, if it did, then there's something seriously wrong.

When we come to high resolution tracks nobody would want a lossy encoding. I have concert Blu-rays and audio only Blu-rays with 24/96 or higher in dts-HD MA and there's no bandwidth issue.

A 6CH 24/192 PCM track would be 27.6Mbps, the max. audio bandwidth allowed on Blu-ray, and if a dts-HD MA track ever reaches that, which means it can't compress at all then it doesn't make any sense. Even the official dts-HD Audio whitepaper doesn't give such a high figure.