Whats the difference between Dolby Digital sound and Dolby Surround?
On the Dolby Surround sound of videotapes and laserdiscs of the past, the left, center, right, and surround tracks are “matrixed,” combined into two channels, then decoded by a Pro Logic receiver back into four channels in your home system. With this method, channels sometimes bleed into each other. With Dolby Digital, the tracks are compressed instead of matrixed, and the original channels are combined into a bitstream offering “discrete” channels of information, rather than the combine-and-extract method of Pro Logic. The end result is channels that don’t bleed. Also, there’s better stereo surround sound. Dolby Digital provides better bass, too, with a separate .1 subwoofer track.
