How is the sound quality of the Blu-Ray better than the HD-DVD'S?

Question

How is the sound quality of the Blu-Ray better than the HD-DVD'S?

Answer 1

Matt S is the one who got it right. HD-DVD did support the lossless formats and discreet 7.1 and all that but remember SPECS DON'T MEAN EVERYTHING! Sometimes you have to compare side by side and in most cases reviewers thought BD edged out HD DVD. It is moot however in the face of HD-DVDs lack of support even from Toshiba after May.

Answer 2

Neither is actually better than the other, the person that said HD DVD does not support 7.1 sound is incorrect because I have Pan's Labyrinth on HD DVD and it has a DTS HD Master 7.1.

Both formats have the option to use Dolby TrueHD as well as DTS HD Master.

HD DVD is now officially an obsolete format anyway so it doesn't really matter.

Answer 3

It mainly has to do with the extra storage space on the 50 GB Blu-ray discs.

The extra space allows Blu-ray discs to contain some of the following lossless audio tracks:

Uncompressed PCM sound

Dolby True-HD

DTS-HD Master Audio

That being said, unless you have an audio receiver (home theater system) that is connected via HDMI, you won't notice a difference.

Note: Although it is rare, there were some HD-DVDs released with DTS-HD Master Audio or Dolby True-HD. However, the majority have only had a DTS-HD (non-lossless) or Dolby Digital track.

From all of my listening experience, the best sounding audio has seemed to be Uncompressed PCM sound.  I realize that this may just be me or have to do with the individual audio tracks that I have listened to - since all 3 formats listed above are supposed to be loss-less.  HD-DVD has not released a disc with Uncompressed PCM sound.

So, basically, not ALL Blu-ray discs do have better sound (some are the same sound as HD-DVD), but MOST do.

Answer 4

its not! they both play the same audio codecs

it is however better than dvd

Answer 5

i think blu-ray supports 7.1 surround sound and hd-dvd only does 5.1.. if you are considering an hd-dvd player don't get one because toshiba announced yesterday that they are discontinuing hd-dvd.

Answer 6

while both formats CAN do Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD MA, and PCM audio, that doesn't mean that those audio codecs are always used.    HD DVD was only 30GB big and had much lower bitrates (how much information you can pass through in a second) than blu-ray.  HD DVD used simple dolby digital a lot of the times, especially on larger movies like King Kong, Transformers, etc.  This is because these movies take up a lot of information space and HD DVD simply didn't have the capacity to put Hi Resolution audio in these movies.  The Blu-ray spec would have allowed it to have a loseless track put on it.  Blu-ray has a lot more titles out that have TrueHD, DTS-HD MA and PCM than HD DVD.  While both formats support those audio codecs, HD DVD can't use them a lot of the time, thats why people say blu-ray audio is better, because it has the spec to put Hi Def audio on all its movies, where HD DVD did not.

Answer 7

I am not an expert on the specs of the sound quality but from what I understand BLu-Ray's larger disc capacity 50gb vs HD-DVD's 30Gb for dual layers allows Blu-Ray to use lossless audio formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD. Where HD-DVD discs do not have the space to achieve better audio, using most of the disc space to get their picture quality.

*Edit* as others have pointed out both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray do use same codecs.  But for whatever reason, I still believe it is because of disc space, studios have not released any HD-DVD titles using Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD. And just a few of the Blu-ray titles have used them.