How does dts audio work

How to combine stereo and surround sound in one AV system. Best soundbars Best Blu-ray players He has worked on What Hi-Fi? In his spare time he enjoys mixing vinyl and cycling. What Hi-Fi? Joe Cox. See all comments 1. Awards winners revealed! The audio amplifier is constantly changing the direction of the current so that the orientation of the poles keeps switching. Changing the orientation of the poles shifts the attraction between the electromagnet and the surrounding natural magnet.

This causes the electromagnet to move back and forth. As the electromagnet moves, it pushes and pulls a speaker cone , which rapidly pushes out air and then pulls back in.

This movement of air particles produces the sounds we hear. For more information, see How Speakers Work. An audio signal, then, is just a fluctuating electrical current. When the current fluctuates one way, the speaker cone moves in; when it fluctuates the other way, the cone moves out.

This signal can be represented as an oscillating wave. The particular sound produced depends on how rapidly and how far the cone moves, which is dictated by the fluctuation pattern in the electrical current. In a surround-sound setup, the signal for the center channel is recorded on both the A stream and the B stream.

The center signals on both streams are identical in amplitude and frequency, and they are synchronized exactly. A surround-sound decoder that supports a central channel will pick out the identical signals in the A stream and B stream based on their pattern and amplitude. In a surround setup with no center speaker, the perfectly balanced center signals will create a " phantom speaker " the illusion of a speaker directly in between the left and right speakers.

The sound signal for the surround channel is also recorded on stream A and stream B, but the identical signals in each stream are out of phase with each other. Instead of playing in synchrony, they are shifted in time in both audio streams.

The result is that the two signals work opposite one another: When the surround signal in stream A tells the left speaker cone to move out, the signal in stream B tells the right speaker cone to move in. Because of this, the surround signal information coming from the front left and front right speakers largely cancels itself out, and you don't hear it.

A surround-sound decoder receives both stream A and stream B and shifts them relative to one another so the surround signals are in phase again. With this shift, the right, left and center signals are all out of phase, and so tend to cancel each other out. In addition to separating the different signals, proper surround decoders pass the audio information through different filters and noise-reduction elements to balance sound levels and reduce noise.

Pro Logic decoders use active "steering" elements to control the process more precisely. Lots of home audio hobbyists have figured out a way to partially unlock the surround channel using only a two-channel home stereo and an extra set of speakers. In the next section, we'll see how this bare-bones surround-sound setup works.

The easiest way to access the surround-sound channel is to get a receiver with a surround-sound decoder. The decoder recognizes the out-of-phase information and extracts it into a third channel. To balance the sound, the receiver also boosts the channel to an appropriate level, and adds a slight time delay.

It is possible to access surround sound with a standard stereo receiver, however, since all the information is actually included in the left and right channels. To do this, get a pair of rear speakers and position them to the left and right of the listener. Then you connect the two - terminals on the rear speakers. The effect is that these out-of-phase signals move the electromagnet for the rear speaker, and so control the rear sound.

To set up a simple central speaker -- one that anchors the left and right stereo speakers -- just turn on your television. If it's a mono-speaker television, it will play both stereo channels mixed together. Stereo televisions will also work decently for anchoring purposes, because both channels emanate from the area of the television.

The other piece you need in this setup is a potentiometer , a device that can apply different degrees of resistance to a current, thereby reducing the voltage in a circuit. In this surround-sound setup, the potentiometer simply acts as a volume control for the rear speakers. You can hook it up anywhere along the circuit leading to the rear speakers.

For detailed instructions on setting up this sort of homemade system, check out Chris Kantack's Surround Sound Information Source. This setup won't give you the same quality surround sound as an actual surround-sound receiver, of course. But assembling a homemade system is a great exercise for understanding how analog surround sound works in the first place. In the s, a new kind of surround sound started popping up in theaters, and since then it has been gradually eclipsing the standard approach.

In the next section, we'll take a look at these new digital theater sound systems. Today, many theaters boast digital surround-sound systems. Digital sound works on a very different principle from analog sound systems. In analog recordings, sound is encoded as a long, fluctuating stream of information. Schedule a time. Calls may be recorded for training and quality control purposes.

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About the numbers By now, you've probably seen numbers like "5. Comments 45 Read comments. Charles Summers from Kirksville MO. Thanks so much for reaching out, Charles. I recommend selecting "Dolby Enabled Speakers Front " during the speaker setup process. I actually have those same A90s toppers myself, and love them.

I recommend running your receiver's speaker calibration system, and then play a movie clip with lots of overhead sound effects like the opening few minutes of Bumblebee when Cybertron is under attack.

If you find the Atmos channels aren't as loud as you like, manually raise their levels by one dB and replay the same scene. Repeat as needed until you get them dialed in — just be mindful of distortion.

Hi Charlie, thanks for reaching out. I'm not familiar with your Nakamichi system, but trying cycling through the different modes and see if one stands out above the others. Dialogue performance is a key differentiator, so a scene with strong spoken word is worth a watch.

Hi Carsten, thanks for reaching out. I'm sorry to hear that you're having trouble with your gear. The best way to troubleshoot your system is to give our tech support folks a call — their toll-free number is on your invoice. Hi Tom, thanks for reaching out. It's hard to say what's causing this; it could be a simple settings change, or there may be a malfunction somewhere in the system.

In your shoes I would do a factory reset of the receiver and set things up fresh. Make sure each channel is connected securely, and rerun your speaker calibration software. I bet that takes care of the first issue. As for the music playback, there is a "5-channel stereo" mode that you can select to play tunes through all of your speakers at the same time.

Hi Steven, thanks for reaching out. Generally speaking, your receiver will try to give you the best processing available. Which audio format that is depends on the source you're watching Blu-ray disc, Netflix streaming, etc. You should only see Atmos as a playback option if you have overhead effects speakers connected to your receiver that'd be a 5.

Hi William, I'm not aware of any compression that takes place in that scenario. Hi Stephen. If the 4K disc you're playing is encoded in Dolby Atmos, you should be able to select that as the audio format under the options menu of your Blu-ray player.

Hi Tahsin, thanks for your question. If you let me know which model receiver you have, I'm happy to see if I can get you a clear answer on how it would function in that scenario. Hi Nishant, I'm sorry to hear you're having difficulties. You may hear some benefits from the Dolby processing with a 2. Normally, dialogue is best handled by a dedicated center channel either in a 3- or 5-channel sound bar, or in a conventional 5.

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All the information in Dolby Digital 5. Sorry, Keanu. To this day, Dolby Digital 5. Dolby more or less dominated the surround sound landscape for years. Then, in , DTS came along, providing its own digital surround sound mixing services for movie production, first hitting theaters with Jurassic Park. The technology eventually trickled down to LaserDisc and DVD but was initially available on a very limited selection of discs. DTS uses a higher bit rate and, therefore, delivers more audio information.

Think of it as similar to the difference between listening to a kbps and kbps MP3 file. The quality difference is noticeable, but as with so many audio-related comparisons, not everyone is sold on it. The sixth speaker was to be placed in the center of the back of a room and was subsequently referred to as a back surround or rear surround. This is where some confusion began to swirl.

Recommended speaker placement, however, has always called for surround speakers to be placed to the sides and just behind the listening position. The point of the sixth speaker is to give the listener the impression that something is approaching from behind or disappearing to the rear. To make things even more confusing, each company offered different versions of 6.

DTS, on the other hand, offered two separate 6. Just when people started getting used to 6. Like 6. Those surround effects that once went to just one rear surround speaker could now go to two speakers in stereo. This development was enabled, in part, by the massive storage potential of Blu-ray. Those who bought a dedicated back surround speaker during the shift to 6.

Dolby offers two different 7. Instead of using matrixing, it applies lossy compression to all of the discrete audio channels, which helps to take up less space on a Blu-ray disc. Dolby TrueHD, on the other hand, is lossless. DTS also has two 7.