What is Dolby Surround, Dolby Digital, and DTS?
A. All of these are methods of creating a more convincing soundfield that seems to “surround” the viewer (at least on Laserdisc, see explanation on Dolby Digital). They require more than 2 speakers. The most widespread surround sound system is Dolby Surround. Dolby surround is an analog system that decodes 2 channels into 4 channels, Left, Right, Center and Surround. The center channel is used to anchor dialog to the screen and the surround channels are used to create ambiance. The surround channel is bandwidth limited-it sounds like A.M. radio. Dolby Surround is backward compatible with stereo. Note: Dolby Pro-Logic is not a surround format. It is the name of the improved Dolby Surround decoder. Dolby Digital, formerly known as AC-3, is rather confusing. It is a digital system that uses lossy compression (this means some sonic information is thrown away to reduce its file size) to compress audio information down to a 384 kilobits per second stream of data. Unlike Dolby Surround, the n
