The Departed Blu-ray disc to feature uncompressed 5.1 audio track
By Darren Murph 
posted Jan 30th 2007 12:43PM
posted Jan 30th 2007 12:43PM
While the mild background screams concerning HD DVD discs getting Dolby TrueHD audio while Blu-ray owners got stuck with a completely uninspiring "standard Dolby Digital" track haven't yet amounted to much, apparently Warner Home Video wants to set the record straight with The Departed. While we knew the film was slated to hit both HD DVD and Blu-ray back at CES, Warner has just now fessed up to the uncompressed audio we can expect to hear from the BD rendition. The HD DVD version will feature the expected TrueHD track, but the Blu-ray flavor will sport a delightfully lossless PCM 5.1 track that should measure up close enough to satisfy all but the most discerning audiophiles. So if you've been enjoying that dual-format BH100, and were leaning HD DVD's way on this one simply due to audio, now you've got one more quandary to solve in the next fortnight.
5.1 still isn't 7.1
Most masters are not mixed for 7.1, so a custom "Home Theater mix" would have to be produced.
How come there has never been a post on this site before when the HD-DVD version featured TrueHD and the Blu-ray didn't?
I'm guessing you don't read the site too much:
http://www.engadgethd.com/search/?q=truehd
Actually, I read it all the time. Like I said, there has never been a standalone posting that existed ONLY to say an HD-DVD had a True-HD track and the Blu-ray version didn't. Which is the only "news" this posting contains.
Ah, I see. Your OP didn't specify that. Well, the post regarding "Happy Feet" mentions it.
TrueHD is loss-less. It's compressed, but like a .zip file, it doesn't lose any bits.
So basically they are identical now.
No.
When will the engadget hd editors understand that an uncompressed pcm soundtrack is NOT "almost as good as" Dolby TrueHD, it is JUST THE SAME?!?
9158 said "When will the engadget hd editors understand that an uncompressed pcm soundtrack is NOT "almost as good as" Dolby TrueHD, it is JUST THE SAME?!?"
Couldn't have said it better myself. PCM is, channel for channel, bit for bit, frequency for frequency indistinguishable from DTS-Master Audio. DTS-HD, on the other hand, while superior to the existing DTS format but less detailed that DTS Master Audio, is more efficiently compressed and takes up less space than PCM. That being said, if a master recording contains 5.1 channels of PCM, then there is no real reason to go beyond 5.1 channels. If the master recording is 7.1 PCM, then there will be a 7.1 channel PCM track. In this particular case, I have no idea whether or not the original master recording was 5.1 or 7.1. If it was, in fact, 5.1, then the DTS-HD 7.1 track is making a mix of the other discrete channels.