I love multichannel sound, and recently had speaker wire installed in the walls for left and right main, and left and right surround, speakers. I finally got it all hooked up, and popped in Brian Wilson's Imagination album, in DTS Audio CD format. Mmmmm, 5.1 surround sound coming up! But my new Sony receiver gave me a "DECODE ERROR." This is ungood.
It's just DTS audio, and I verified the receiver can handle DTS just fine (including DTS-ES for 6.1 channels, and DTS Neo:6 for 6.1 audio from stereo sources, kinda like Pro Logic). so why won't it work?
The answer lies in the DTS Audio CD format. It is just a plain old audio CD, red book and all. But instead of each track being regular PCM audio, it is DTS data encoded as PCM audio. So if you pop it in a regular CD player, you'll get a lot of hissing. But I was getting nothing, just a "DECODE ERROR."
I finally figured out there is an option for "DECODE PRIORITY," which is set by default to PCM for the DVD's digital input. Normally, no PCM data would be sent for a DTS signal, and it would just figure out it is DTS and start playing. But because of the special format of DTS Audio CDs, it had trouble here. Setting the priority to "AUTO" fixed the problem.
Why have it set to PCM by default? Because for regular audio CDs, it can take a fraction of a second to determine what format the data is in, so you can miss some audio. It'd be nice if it would automatically fall over to "AUTO" if it detected a "DECODE ERROR," though.
Now Playing: Hope That I Get Old Before I D - They Might Be Giants (Then - The Earlier Years (1))
