Many are probably thinking I should just stick to one album per disc and stop whining!
Blank discs are pretty cheap these days, so yeah.
(I'm just trying to give you a hard time there!)
BTW, Kazaam, you seem to describe dts and AC3 as being about the same in their function. Is one necessarily better than the other?
Perhaps the most concrete evidence in favor of DTS over AC3 is that supposedly the AC3 codec goes 'mono' at one of the upper frequency points and beyond, whereas the DTS codec doesn't go 'mono' and stays stereo/multichannel. Granted, I suspect it's a fairly high frequency and could be hard to notice. I can't recall for sure, but I think Neil posted about it a while back.
Other than that, I think it's harder to prove that DTS is better than AC3. Though, it does seem that a large number of us (perhaps the majority?) would prefer DTS for music. (Personally, I find AC3 fine for movies, but prefer DTS for music.)
Amongst some of the reasons we think DTS may be better suited to music than AC3 are, again, not necessarilly provable facts but some of the following: (1) It seems that a majority of music releases on DTS just seem to sound better than their AC3 counterparts, but the hole in that theory is that different mastering could affect overall sound. (2) Those of us who prefer DTS will point to the higher bitrate that DTS allows; for instance, AC3 only goes as high as 448kbps on DVD but DTS can go as high as approximately 1800kbps (or was it 1400kbps, I forget????). However the hole in that theory is that it can be argued that AC3 *might* be a more efficient codec and theoretically could sound just as good at lower bitrates. But (3) The comeback to that is some of us believe DTS *might* have a more music-friendly codec with a compression algorithm that potentially keeps more of that special something that music needs to sound good, rather than throw it away. Though, that is hard to prove.
I guess it all just comes down to our ears and, at least for myself, I believe DTS is better than AC3 for music based on the examples I've heard. Though, this is hardly scientific.
EDIT: And I should add that there have been some instances where I've thought AC3 for music sounded fairly good, such as the Brian Wilson Presents Smile DVD-Video. And, heck, if memory serves me correctly I think the AC3 actually sounded better than the DTS on my "Standing In The Shadows of Motown" DVD-Video. And although those instances are in the minority for me, I suppose this just illustrates why it's hard to prove either way.
It seems to me you can have AC3 and dts encoding on dvd's, but only dts for CD's.
I've never seen AC3 on a CD before, so I do suspect this might be true. But I can't say for certain.
