The so called "immersive sound" format wars may be heating up soon. To date, Dolby has made the biggest splash with Dolby Atmos, a height-enhanced object-oriented surround sound format which debuted in theaters in 2012 and on home theater products and Blu-ray Discs in 2014. But, as usual, content is limiting the format's adoption. With over 200 theatrical titles announced or already released, only four titles have been released on Blu-ray with Dolby Atmos sound, with three more announced for later this year (including "Gravity").
AURO-3D actually came out a bit earlier than Dolby Atmos in theaters (2011), and AURO announced their own home receiver (the $17,000 Auriga) with AURO-3D processing a few weeks before Dolby's Atmos announcements. But the first consumer products with AURO-3D decoding hit the US market a few months later, including receivers from Marantz and Denon. High-end processors with AURO-3D decoding from Trinnov and Steinway Lyngdorf were also announced last fall. But the content selection for AURO-3D is even more limited than Dolby Atmos. Around 50 titles have been released in the AURO-3D format in theaters worldwide. These have been mostly obscure international titles, but there are some popular movies, including a fair amount of titles that overlap with Dolby Atmos. For home software, eight Blu-ray titles are listed on AURO's web site. Ever heard of any of them? Me neither.
And this leaves DTS. DTS has been a thorn in Dolby's side (ahem, I mean, "providing friendly competition") for years. DTS may be showing up late to the immersive sound party, but they are promising big things for the official launch of DTS:X in March. According to DTS, brands such as Anthem, Denon, Integra, Krell, Marantz, McIntosh, Onkyo, Outlaw Audio, Pioneer, Steinway Lyngdorf, Theta Digital, Trinnov Audio, and Yamaha are expected to have products which include DTS:X decoding. The manufacturers themselves remain silent, except Steinway Lyngdorf, who has confirmed that their P200 processor ($18,000) will include DTS:X decoding. We're not sure when products with DTS:X may hit the market, nor whether it will be possible to upgrade any existing gear to decode DTS:X or if new hardware will be required in all cases.
As for how and when DTS:X content will be delivered to the home market, the company is being very tight-lipped. At CES 2015, I tried to get a meeting with DTS execs to discuss the details of DTS:X but was refused. DTS said only, "We have no comments on DTS:X at this time. Stay tuned for the official launch in March." They put on a nice demo, but gave no details as to how it would come to market. So, as far as I'm concerned, DTS:X is vaporware (albeit vaporware with a nice demo) until proven otherwise.
Even so, we have some pretty big clues as to how DTS:X content could be delivered to the home. The DTS 2015 demo disc, which was handed out at the DTS booth at CES 2015, includes a number of clips labeled "DTS-HD 7.1 | DTS:X." This suggests that DTS is taking a cue from Dolby (no pun intended) in delivering the new immersive sound format using an existing audio codec that is already part of the Blu-ray Disc spec. This enables two things. Existing Blu-ray players should be able to play DTS:X titles and bitstream the audio data to a compatible receiver or processor for decoding. Also, DTS:X Blu-ray titles should play back fine on non-DTS:X-enabled hardware -- you'll just be missing the height information. I played the DTS disc back on an OPPO BDP-103 Blu-ray player through a Marantz receiver and the DTS:X tracks played back as expected as DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1.
But perhaps more interesting is that one of the clips on the disc is from a film that was released theatrically in Dolby Atmos, namely, "Rio 2." Does this mean DTS is lobbying the studios to release their Dolby Atmos-encoded theatrical titles for the home market in DTS:X? The demo clip suggests this this is a possibility. We'll have to check back in March as more details on the DTS:X launch hopefully become available.
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