Is the DTS vs. Dolby war effectively over?
I am not in these markets and certainly don&#x27;t understand the finer details, or major ones like &quot;Xperi needs <i>X</i> license purchases to survive as a company&quot;, so I&#x27;m putting this out there at <i>that</i> level -- please correct me where I&#x27;m being naive, if you feel the need[0]. :)<p>There&#x27;s always been a pretty solid <i>few</i> &quot;categories&quot; of products in this space.  There&#x27;s my Mom and Dad, who purchased a sound bar for the place up north because the TV speakers were terrible and the room acoustics were so bad you couldn&#x27;t understand anything said[1] and it <i>does</i> rain up there, sometimes.  There&#x27;s &quot;I want reasonable surround sound&quot; guys who buy higher-end sound bars&#x2F;lower end all-in-one 5.1 set ups.  There&#x27;s the guys like me who went through the trouble of setting up the room, perfectly, and purchased a mid-range AVR, solid TV, and higher-end speakers[2], and the &quot;Reference Folks&quot; -- all premium, high-end, obsess about aspects beyond the speakers&#x2F;devices&#x2F;cables to &quot;wall coatings, double dry-wall, sound insulation, etc, etc.&quot;<p>There&#x27;s several categories in-between those, but everyone above me <i>absolutely</i> cares about having that track and <i>will</i> pay extra for it.  Depending on the set up, it wasn&#x27;t (probably still isn&#x27;t at some level) uncommon for folks like this to have a separate component for decoding specific audio tracks sending the decoded result of each channel separately to the amp, which did nothing but what it&#x27;s name suggests.  There&#x27;s a world where DTS can continue to exist for these folks.  They&#x27;re still consumers of Blu-Ray discs, or have Plex servers with uncompressed versions of things, for the same reasons -- streaming service audio and video isn&#x27;t as good.  It sounds like they were already trying to position themselves as &quot;the higher-end&quot;, which was a far better value proposition before streaming platforms took over, now that market is much more niche.<p>I, similarly, didn&#x27;t know about streaming platforms not supporting DTS.  Frankly, since having kids, I pay a lot less attention to that space.  I&#x27;m surprised the benefits of delivering the DTS (reasonably compressed, but DVD quality) track don&#x27;t outweigh the extra size.  These aren&#x27;t small files and video is most of it, but I&#x27;d take a small hit there for some movies in my collection to hear the DTS audio.  Adding to the file size a bit is certainly something I&#x27;d like to see; I&#x27;d probably pay a buck more a month for it if a &quot;Premium Streaming&quot; option were available -- well, I would have in the past.  I guess the issue they face is that there&#x27;s nothing particularly special about the DTS sound track these days[3].  Is there no technical benefit between DTS:X and Dolby Atmos?  I sounds like DTS supports more speakers.<p>Outside of streaming video, does it matter for gaming?  It seems like if my console could output a DTS:X signal to my AVR, assuming my AVR supported it, I could setup 32 speakers (and pretend I could tell the difference between that and, say, 9), but I&#x27;m know there&#x27;s people who would care if that exists.  I know my Xbox S can output some compressed formats to my AVR, I&#x27;m not sure if DTS:X is among them, but there are those who would pay for that ability, delivered by software (if MS isn&#x27;t doing that already).<p>So, not taking into account whether or not Xperi could <i>survive</i> the smaller -- high-end only -- market or not (it&#x27;s a pretty <i>big</i> space), having support for a better audio codec for just the uses of &quot;discs&#x2F;Plex&quot; and non-video is going to rank higher than most of the trivialities I&#x27;ve seen hundreds dropped on by people in the high-end home theater&#x2F;audio space[4].  Maybe that means cranking up the licensing fees, and my category of owner no longer has the next generation&#x27;s DTS creation available to it.  It also probably matters a lot less to me in that category because the sound quality of the DD:Atmos tracks that I&#x27;ve heard have all been on the great side.  Once it passes a certain threshold, people in my category don&#x27;t care about it -- our other equipment probably doesn&#x27;t support some of the things DTS:X provides that DD:Atmos doesn&#x27;t (my AVR handles 9.1 speakers in various configurations, max).<p>[0] Kindly, preferably, I won&#x27;t hold you to it.<p>[1] It amplified deep all the way through mid-range, but just below an average woman&#x27;s voice, so if soundtrack sounds, noise&#x2F;effects, or a man&#x27;s voice would be 10-20% louder than a woman&#x27;s.  We needed some dampening panels but it&#x27;s a lake house, main floor -- all windows except for the <i>one</i> spot it makes sense to put a TV.<p>[2] Or even &quot;purchased speakers they had to buy one by one, separately&quot;, since most of the companies requiring you to do that at least <i>partly</i> because it&#x27;s hard to sell integrated 7.1&#x2F;5.1 sets in the $3,000+ range.<p>[3] Maybe there never was, but the DTS tracks on some movies have bullets that fly through me whereas the DD tracks they wouldn&#x27;t leave the center speaker.  I&#x27;ve heard <i>many</i>, <i>perfect</i> DD tracks, but among my collection I have several examples where the DTS track sounds perfect and the DD track sounds like up-mixed stereo, and a small handful where the DD track is great ... provided you don&#x27;t listen to the DTS track, where everything is just a little wider, particularly in the back, and it makes everything kind of &quot;line up&quot; better -- a guy runs past the camera and the footsteps come from behind <i>just</i> to the right, whereas the character goes through you on the DD side.  It also seemed as though the DTS tracks engage the LFE parts.  I have an old-school piston ButtKicker under my couch, we <i>feel</i> that, and when that part is off, it <i>wrecks</i> the experience of some movies for us (my favorite being sending some of the notes from a sound-track&#x27;s bass guitar into LFE where it over-powers <i>everything</i> else going on).  I have only anecdata, I&#x27;ll admit, though.<p>[4] I&#x27;m just jealous -- very happy with the sound of my own system, but I know a few people who obsess and spend a lot of money, constantly tweaking&#x2F;upgrading their Home Theater space and when you hear the same movie played on their perfect system, you come home and it briefly makes your system sound like the speakers are empty soup cans connected by rope to the receiver.