Ransom DTS Track

[alleycat]

So one of my upcoming projects is the extended version of Ransom. A friend is capturing the LD and he has the AC3 LD on the way to him as we speak. There is also a DTS LD, but it's quite expensive. I'm toying with the idea of buying this as well to capture the DTS track, but the disc is at least $130. I guess I could sell it afterwards to get back some of the money, but what I'm trying to figure out is in general how better a DTS track is over an AC3 track? I know on paper the bit rate is much higher, but I read a review of the Jurassic Park LD's and the reviewer said with their setup there was hardly any noticeable difference between the AC3 and DTS tracks. It's a lot of money to drop and I can't find any reviews of the Ransom tracks, let alone someone comparing the two. 

Any thoughts?

[Chewtobacca]

This is an old controversy.  Of course, the difference in bitrate is not conclusive, because different codecs are being compared.  Dolby Digital is more efficient in terms of compression.  There's a rough consensus:

full DTS > AC-3@640kbps > half DTS > AC-3@448kbps (most DVDs) > AC-3@384kbps (LD)

But that's on paper.  (In practice, people often prefer the AC-3 tracks on LDs to their equivalents on DVD, despite the lower bitrate.)  And there are complicating factors that make comparison of DTS and AC-3 difficult.  Removing the dialnorm from an AC-3 track and volume-matching it to its (often louder) DTS equivalent levels the playing field a fair bit, to the point at which the difference isn't that great, in my opinion.  Procuring a full DTS track is generally thought to be worthwhile in terms of quality, but I wouldn't pay a price that's as high as the one you listed unless there was something known to be extraordinary about that particular mix/track.  By far the biggest factor in audio quality is how the studio has (mis)handled it, not the codec/bitrate.

[alleycat]

This is an old controversy.  Of course, the difference in bitrate is not conclusive, because different codecs are being compared.  Dolby Digital is more efficient in terms of compression.  There's a rough consensus:

full DTS > AC-3@640kbps > half DTS > AC-3@448kbps (most DVDs) > AC-3@384kbps (LD)

But that's on paper.  (In practice, people often prefer the AC-3 tracks on LDs to their equivalents on DVD, despite the lower bitrate.)  And there are complicating factors that makes comparison of DTS and AC-3 difficult.  Removing the dialnorm from an AC-3 track and volume-matching it to its (often louder) DTS equivalent levels the playing field a fair bit, to the point at which the difference isn't that great, in my opinion.  Procuring a full DTS track is generally thought to be worthwhile in terms of quality, but I wouldn't pay a price that's as high as the one you listed unless there was something known to be extraordinary about that particular mix/track.  By far the biggest factor in audio quality is how the studio has (mis)handled it, not the codec/bitrate.

Thanks for the info Chewtobacca it's very helpful. It's difficult to find anything about these discs online but from what I can see on LDDB the AC3 and DTS discs were released about a year apart from each other, and I imagine both would have used the same master so it's more a matter of codec/bitrate. I've also not seen or heard anything about this DTS being unique in any way, so in that case I think I'll stick with the AC3 track. Cheers

[Chewtobacca]

You're welcome. With luck, someone here will have the disc. But it's not worth paying $130 (or more) for a DTS track, as far as I'm concerned.

[BDgeek]

Good to hear talk about Ramson! I've always been a fan!

I don't know if it's true at all, but I always heard back in the day that DTS LDs had different mixes of their own. Made in house by DTS folks themselves and were never recycled in any other format.

Kind of like Dolby did a in house remix of Die Hard in Atmos for the format demonstration but it was never ported to the UHD (at least this one I know to be true).

Anyways, I'll always be up to make a contribution for LD audio preservation, but right now I'm more focused on titles already released on UHD.

And it's such a shame Disney burried the Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures labels. They have most of my 90ies favorites: The Rock, Crimson Tide, Armageddon, Con Air, Gone in 60 Seconds, Ramson, Metro, Face/Off (shared with Paramount) and many others.

[ilpubzo5ie]

The extended version of Ransom is one of the LDs that I'd like to capture with the Domesday Duplicator. Unfortunately, AC3 isn't supported yet and I don't have the DTS version of the LD. So the DTS track would be welcome for me too. The AC3 also, as it saves another capture run with the soundcard.

[alleycat]

I've actually got a friend in the US doing this via Domesday, the disc is currently on the way to him from Japan. The plan will then be to take the additional footage and merge it with the existing blu ray.

[digitalfreaknyc]

I've actually got a friend in the US doing this via Domesday, the disc is currently on the way to him from Japan. The plan will then be to take the additional footage and merge it with the existing blu ray.

Is it the Japanese version?

Who is doing the transfer? I've got a couple of discs I'd love transferred.

[ilpubzo5ie]

I've actually got a friend in the US doing this via Domesday, the disc is currently on the way to him from Japan. The plan will then be to take the additional footage and merge it with the existing blu ray.

Awesome. Note that DTS is not yes supported by ld-decode. There is a quick hack to enable it but it's mostly untested and especially there's no error detection or concealment.

See: https://github.com/happycube/ld-decode/issues/527

[alleycat]

Is it not possible to decode as wav and then rebuild as a DTS file afterwards?