DSU vs. Neural:X use case

[William Lemmerhirt]

Agree, some turn it all on and hate it and it’s back to DIRECT mode. Some love all of the processing and leave it on for everything. ALL CHANNEL STEREO all of the time is a popular one as well.

Oof. Yeah, the All channel stereo... I’ll never get that one. Lol.

 

[lovinthehd]

fill in the blanks (remember, I got 5.1 speaker layout):
1. Content is Stereo 2.0: to use the DNX/DSU or the DVX/DVH = ?????????
2. content is 5.1: to use DNX/DSU or the DVX/DVH or none = ????????????

There's no rules, it's just a product you can choose to use or not, nice having choices.

First, I have older gear so no Dolby Surround or NeuralX, just the older upmixers (Dolby PLIIx/z and Neo:6/X on a few avrs). I do use Dolby upmixers far more than the DTS for music, and depends on the particular music, but I use it frequently. For movies I do source a lot of DD+ movies on streaming plus some older dvds in DD, and I upmix those to 7.1 and almost always with 2.0 content. With 7.1 content I generally play back as is. Some shows I may revert to 2.0 if it sounds odd. It's all preference, do what you like. AVRs can help out with presets for types of content, or just remembering your last used....don't overthink it. Experiment.

 

[Philnick]

On my Yamaha RX-A3070 AVR, I had been using Straight at the beginning of a film to see if I'm getting real Atmos or X - and if not, toggling over to Neural:X to animate my ceiling speakers.

Then I found the Auto setting for the AVR's Surround Decoder, which steps out of the way for Atmos or X, but applies Neural:X to DTS sources and the DSU to everything else.

Around the same time, I saw our host's comment that the DSU sounds better than Neural:X on stereo music, so I did a comparison.

He's right - as far as that goes - but neither of them sounds as clear as All Channel Stereo, which is a lot less processed, since it simply ties together all the channels on each side of the room (including the overheads) and sends mono to the center channel. (It of course does the usual bass management.)

I'll audition the DSU on stereo movie soundtracks, which are frequently designed with matrix decoding in mind, but not on stereo music.