Cinema DTS foobar2000 plugin - is it good?

[spoRv]

I had the opportunity to obtain a direct rip of a Cinema DTS recorded digitally from a DTS-6D hardware decoder; I then compared that to the FooBar decoded version from .aud files.

The L C R channels are completely the same - zero difference!

But the SL SR and LFE were, as expected, different; when amplified to the same levels, they are different. Not a lot of difference, indeed.
This is due to different method of LFE extraction IMHO.

Apart the fact that it's a quite hard job to rip several tracks from an hardware decoder, without counting the difficulty to find a working one, does it worth the hassle? For the most purist ones maybe, but as the main channels L C R - the most important and used ones - are bit-perfect identical, and the differences on SL SR LFE are minimal, personally I think that the APT-X100 FooBar2000 plugin do a great job!

[BDgeek]

Great input. Thanks a lot spoRv!

Can you please be a little more specifc on what were the differences noted? Sound levelss or what?

[spoRv]

The differences I noted were:
- levels: we are talking about tenth of dB in not less, so nothing big I guess
- waveforms: small shape differences; due to how the LFE is extracted (mostly due to what type of crossover I think)

I can't recall the difference between Cinema DTS and home DTS tracks (IF they used the same mix, of course); but probably they are much bigger than hardware and software decoder, AND those are only on SL SR LFE.

But when you take in account that, if/when converted to 23.976fps and/or 48kHz, the original track will be no more, IMHO those differences are negligible - when adjusted to the same level, via headphone, carefully comparing each track, they were barely different; but I dare ANYONE in this world to spot these tiny differences listening to the track via an home theater setup!