What's the skinny on the wide variety of sound formats?

[sharptailhunter]

I'm trying to understand what is true 7.1 surround sound. None of the BDs I own say that they play 7.1 sound, only 5.1. Some say Master DTS, others say Dolby TrueHD. Are both of those still just 5.1? Is 7.1 something that my avr creates? Are there any BDs that are recorded in 7.1?

 

[HDPCsound]

You better get a Blu ray with 7.1 and listen the difference, you can start with the Lionsgate Films.

 

[jostenmeat]

I'm trying to understand what is true 7.1 surround sound. None of the BDs I own say that they play 7.1 sound, only 5.1. Some say Master DTS, others say Dolby TrueHD. Are both of those still just 5.1? Is 7.1 something that my avr creates? Are there any BDs that are recorded in 7.1?

There are currently 143 titles out of 2323 BDs that have 7.1.

It's true that Lionsgate has the most with 54 titles, or 38% of the selection.

83% of the 7.1 titles come as DTS-MA.

Use this site, go to filters above, specifically audio in this case, apply, and check it out:
http://www.blu-raystats.com/Stats/Stats.php

 

[GlocksRock]

TrueHD and DTS-HD MA are both different forms of compressed lossless codecs, the other lossless type is PCM, which in fully uncompressed lossless audio. There are not many true 7.1 discs out there, but if you have a 7.1 speaker setup then your AVR may be able to create a 7.1 sound field by using PLIIx, which doesn't alter the audio, it just steers it to the channel where the sound should be coming from.

 

[sharptailhunter]

Hey guys, thanks for the replies. I think I'm kind of getting it understood, finally. All the BDs I own are in 5.1. However, I rented 3:10 to Yuma and that's when my avr said it was playing 7.1, maybe that's why the shoot out scenes sounded so good.

I can toggle between different surround sound modes on my avr, and some of em mix in PLIIx music or movie and other modes. They all sound pretty darn good too.

I also switched my PS3 from sending the audio content via LPCM to bitstream. I can't really tell a difference, but I guess it does look cool on my avr when it says DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD, all lit up in sexy red!