DTS CDs?

General Questions
#1

I’ve been meaning to buy “Hell Freezes Over” by The Eagles for some time and finally was in a store and had my short term memory wired to ‘receive’ for a change. So I grabbed one out of the rack, wondering briefly why the damn jewel case was larger than the two Miles Davis CDs I was also buying, but figured “more Madison Ave. BS”.

So I get home and open it, and notice for the first time that on the cover it says (in small print) “For DTS-Capable 5.1 Sound Systems”. Yeah, right, says I and stick it in the player. Nothing but white noise (my Denon amp is not DTS-capable). It plays fine in my DVD player with the Yamaha DTS amp (and sounds great, by the way), but otherwise, I guess I’m screwed.

Is this something new, or am I just hopelessly behind the information curve? Anybody want to trade a normal CD for this one?

#2

If it is what I think it is you got a audio DVD and you are SOL if you have a CD player

#3

kanicbird, it has to be a CD. If it were a DVD the CD player would reject the disk and wouldn’t have played anything. Audio DVDs do exist, however.

Your CD contains compressed audio encoded in DTS. The data is decompressed and decoded by the DTS amplifier. The “white noise” is an audio representation of the raw digital data. You’d get the same effect if you put a CD-ROM into a CD player.

#4

Actually, I think CD performance with DVDs (and other stuff it can’t understand) is unspecified. The last time I checked a (bad) CDR in a medium range CD deck, it spun it up really fast (but played nothing) and when I got nervous and hit eject, shoved the tray out right away w/o stopping it (wheee!).

Anyhow, I found this explanation of DTS. Seems it’s nothing like redbook, so you are SOL for regular cd players. You need a digital decoder for this kinda thing.

#5

Are these things common? Why would anyone routinely buy music CDs that can’t be played on a portable/car/home/computer stereo? Seems like a product destined for the scrap heap to me.

#6

The CDs are targeted at the high-end audio market, for people who have the necessary DTS equipment. As you mentioned, the audio was excellent.