No lossless sound for Xbox 360 Elite system

[nebrazca78]

Show's how much you know about current audio. :P

First of All DTS CDs have been around for many, many years. They conform to all Red Book standards except for how the music is encoded on the disc. I beleive most are 44.1 KHz/24-bit inorder to keep the bitrate the same as the fixes bitrate of a normal Audio CD.

I'd like to note that these are NOT standard music CDs which is what I thought we were talking about. These are special music CDs encoded is DTS for use with surround systems. Not only are they a total niche market but there are very few titles available. I use a stereo receiver to listen to music so this is useless for me anyway. Moreover, they are still encoded in DTS, thus by default are using compressed data.

Now that that's out of the way if you look back you'll see that i used the Hotel California DVD-A disc for my testing.

You didn't make that clear. You never said you were using a DVD-A disc, although you did reference MLP.

It Contains the Album in full surround in 96/24 MLP, 48/24 DTS and 48/16 DD. There's also a stero 196/24 track that i couldn't test because i don't have a reciever capbable of playing it.

I would be very interested to hear that stereo track...I bet it's phenominal.

MLP or Meridian Lossless Packing, is a form of lossless compression owned by Dolby Labs that is the standard for DVD-A.

Thanks for the info.

I choose to use DVD-A for my testing because it's already a much higher quality file then a CD.

I ripped the MLP and the DTS tracks off the DVD-A. Then i convered the MLP to 44.1/24 DTS, which is the standard for DTS-CD.

I then made my own DVD-Audio Disc comprising of 1 track with 4 Audio Channels.

1 - 96/24 MLP
2 - DTS 48/24 (Original)
3 - DTS 44.1/24 (DTS-CD)
4 - Dolby Digital 48/16 (Made from MLP Source)

I could not tell a difference between the DTS and MLP tracks aside from the fact that DTS had boosted the Bass, which the encoder is known to do.

The Dobly track was the only one with a notable difference and it wasn't so much in quality as it was the volume levels were off. This is because of mandatory audio level adjustments preformed by the encoder. I tried as much as possible to normalize it, but to little success.

In short in a blind test no one could tell the difference between the MLP and DTS aside from the bass. Both sound equally clear.

Lossless and lossy have no noticable difference to a selection of normal people if the encoding is done right.

If you're interested i used some expensive Surcode encoding programs to do the encoding.

I respect your opinion but I still don't agree. As an audiophile just the bass boost alone is enough keep me away. The fact of the matter is that some of the musical data is gone. If you 're telling me it's not possible for anyone to tell the difference I think that's ludicrous.