DTS-CD Need a primer on the CD Stereo to DTS 5.1 conversion process

[B&W Driver]

Hello QQF DTS Conversion Board ~ I recently heard a DTS 5.1 Surround Upmix of an album that I've had in my collection for decades and, quite frankly, it was like hearing the music for the first time...and, as a [very] long time stereo CD collector and listener, this was, for me, the first really exciting thing to come out of the physical music media world for a very very long time.

I hope that I'm on the correct board. If not, please advise me.

As I've never performed any kind of recording format conversions or done any "CD ripping," I'd like to ask the board for advice about how to get started with employing the physical stereo CD media that we already own and use what we have -- i.e., a Mac computer and an Oppo 105D player -- to get the DTS surround sound that I referred to in the opening sentence of this thread.

I posted the same question on another forum and was told that the QQF was the place to go for these kinds of questions.

Thank you very much for your time ~ BWD

 

[HomerJAU]

The easiest format for you to playback on any equipment will be FLAC. FLAC can contain up to 8 channels (7.1) but can also hold 5.1 and Quad. FLAC is almost a universal standard format and is supported on many devices from computers, disc players to TVs and many Car audio players.

The problem with DTS is you need to encode your music to DTS using a DTS encoder ($$). That needs each channel as an individual mono channel file (example: 6 x monos for 5.1). So it can be more complex, but like many things, not difficult once you know how

DTS DVDs are lossy (some audio data is discarded/lost during encoding). FLAC is lossless. CDs are lossless, Converting CDs to FLAC is lossless.

I'd recommend doing everything in FLAC (flac is like a file compression system for WAV files, WAV being an uncompressed audio file format). FLACs are smaller than WAVs, which can be important if you have a large music collection and you use USB sticks and drives, although USB drive are large these days.

An issue is that you use MAC computers. The issue being there's less freeware applications to choose to do the tasks of ripping your current disc collection to FLAC (or another file format) - that includes decryption of discs and conversion to FLAC files on your hard drive etc.

'Tagging' with metadata (artist, album, song names and album cover art) so you can see this during playback or search for an album by an artist etc. is another task you can do and there are lots of free apps that do this easily.

For CDs I think a program called Foobar2000 will work on MAC. You can insert a CD and it will rip and convert to FLAC. (one song per file is normal). It recognizes discs and can add 'Tagging' automatically.

Once you have the stereo FLAC you can use it in an upmix program. Again you have a choice in Windows, but in MAC only know of Penteo 16 Pro (license fee). In Windows you have Foobar2000 with a freesurround plug-in, SpecWeb (both free, donationware) and Penteo (fee).

These upmix programs take a stereo FLAC file as input and output a multichannel FLAC file you can play immediately. To create a DTS disc, you need to convert the multichannel file to mono files, encode to DTS then compose a DVD disc using the DTS files and burn the disc. Again, much easier and faster to simply play the FLAC files from a usb drive or hard drive.

You can buy Windows emulation software you install on your MAC, once installed you can then run Windows on your MAC (as well as MAC OS) and install 'Windows Only' programs in your emulation s/w on your MAC. look up 'Parallels for MAC' on Google. I think you can get a free trial.

I'm planning to do a new 'HOW TO' Upmix stereo to Multichannel using Penteo over the weekend and will post here on QQ. Keep an eye out.

THX
Garry

 

[B&W Driver]

It took quite a while to get a response over here on the QQF, but this primer makes seeing all of those names in the "Who Read this Thread" -- and didn't respond with just a basic reply -- worth it. As the original subject title clearly indicates, I'm looking for posts that will help beginners, like myself, get a basic idea of what the various upmixing options are and, to Garry's credit, what might be a better approach.

Thank you, sir, for helping us gain at least a cursory understanding of how we might be able to experiment with our own physical media.