good points, New Homebrew.

there was a discussion about DTS vs. DVD-Video (with PCM tracks for all surround channels) on DATheads a little while ago. as i recall, one or two people said they preferred the uncompressed PCM surround version, and one or two people said they preferred the DTS version... i forget the claims pro-DTS in those messages, but i think the creator of those Dead shows in DTS/surround basically decided he'd stick with DTS since it would fit onto CDRs.

also, as New Homebrew pointed out, there aren't that many sources that can be "legitimately" made into 'true' surround sound audio recordings... sure, there are some where two excellent audience recordings are made at a show as well as a soundboard feed (and those do have potential to make for quite good surround mixes). but for the most part, taking a stereo recording and converting it to surround doesn't really "improve" the sound quality per se. in some ways, it's like taking a stereo (2 channel) source and doing some panning here and some panning there, adding some EQ on one 'version' of the original stereo track, and then clumping them together. (i know, that wasn't a very eloquent way of putting it. but going 2.0 stereo to 5.1 surround is like upsampling audio from 16-bit to 24-bit; you aren't getting better sound quality, just increasing the file size.)


U2Lynne - you've never looked at the audio setup on an official DVD? hmmm. interesting. i guess i'm geeky in that i always tunnel through all the menus to make sure i view all of the disc's contents. you may want to do this from time to time, as i know some official DVDs are set to play the 5.1 surround audio track by default... and you might get better sound playing the 2.0 stereo audio since you don't have a surround sound system set up.