A December 5th Analog Devices press release announces support of DTS 96/24 amongst their Melody™ series of digital signal processing devices, used within popular consumer processors, receivers and amplifiers. “The Melody DTS 96/24 decoder joins our family of Melody Floating-Point DTS Extended Surround decoders in delivering high-resolution digital audio…” said Mike Haidar, product line director, software & systems technology, DSP and System Products Division, Analog Devices, Inc.

Entire Analog Devices release here

However, the press release also includes the following sentence:

“When encoded in the video zone of DVD-Audio discs, DTS 96/24 delivers 96/24 audio resolution on any existing DVD-Video player, eliminating the need for a separate DVD-Audio player. DTS 96/24 soundtracks, on either DVD-Video or DVD-Audio, are fully backward compatible with existing DTS decoders, which will read and output a 48kHz signal.”

In the opinion of High Fidelity Review, this is a gross misrepresentation of the technologies involved, specifically the need for a DVD-Audio player. DTS 96/24 is not a replacement for nor can be directly compared to the fidelity of DVD-Audio, delivered either via PCM or Meridian Lossless Packing. DTS 96/24 is a compressed lossy format, which discards audio information and is inherently inferior to either PCM or MLP. The content of a true DVD-Audio track is loss-less and retains all the information present in the original source material, which is the reason why DVD-Audio exists in the first place.

We have voiced our objections to Analog Devices and await their response. It is vital that consumers are not given misleading or inaccurate information for formats such as DVD-Audio and SACD to succeed.