From Jianfeng's English Blog www.xujianfeng.com

Along with our people’s continued mania over home theatres, the trend to encode and store music on DTS CDs is finally becoming phenomenal in China’s recording industries. These days, if you wander into any of the city’s record stores, you won’t miss a big or small stack of music CDs that come in DTS surround fomat. They stand out among conventional music CDs because they are contained in long delux thick cases with the unmistakable DTS logo printed across the front. And they are expensive too because they proudly herald a brand new hight of audio experience that places you at the center of 5.1 or 6.1 channels of music.

It’s definitely a good thing for me to realize that my home theatre now can play more than movies. It’s true I installed the system mainly for watching movies on DVD. But now, sliding one DTS music CD into the DVD player, I can just ignore the TV and close my eyes to drown myself in a small, self-centered theatre of multi-dimensional sweet music. You know, I hardly used my home theatre to play music before on its two front speakers, since I was never very satisfied with its presentation of hi-fi stereo music. But with my fine tuning, the Jamo’s 10,000-yuan 5.1 surround system, including the AV amplifier, two front speakers, two surround speakers, one center and one subwoofer, though not a big investment, has been able to deliver in my own room the surprising better-than-cinema accoustics of movies. Now with DTS music CDs, isn’t it a wonderful thing that I may get the same sensations of music alone?

So I started buying some DTS music CDs, and the DTS CDs I bought are mainly selections of old songs that have been remastered to conform to the new surround format. By remaster, I mean the songs are sung by other voice-strong singers instead of the original singers, and the instrumental mix is more catering to the fancies of hi-fi buffs. You know, these days, some record companies may have gone too far to remix too many old songs for bland hi-fi effects, but I myself certainly wouldn’t be stubbornly opposed to new interpretations of the old tunes, including the music and vocal. And this time, the new interpretations are in surround format and should yield different but more exciting listening experiences.

But is that so? I have to admit, after trying these DTS music CDs on my home theatre for a couple of nights, the surround music therein turned out to be a big disppointment after all. The inadequacy of the music is not found in the quality of recording and replay, but rather, in a distortion of our experience of listening to music in a live setting. That is, the purportedly natural listening experience of DTS surruound music is not natural at all, and you just feel like being drawn out of the audience and dropped into the center of threads of music coming from varied directions. And this kind of sitting-alone-at-the-center feeling is weird because it’s vastly different from our experience in listening to stereo music from two main speakers placed in front of you. You know, when you are listening to two front speakers for stereo music, you can sort of imagine or position yourself in the audience and feel the music flows out to you from some stage up front. In fact, this sensation from stereo music conforms to the live setting of a concert or band performance. No matter what front seat ticket you get, there is always the space between you and the stage and the music coming from different posts on the stage. In this sense, home stereo music should sound more real and sensational because the line formed by the front edges of the two main speakers kind of marks the stage’s front line that separates you and the musicians performing on the stage. Whereas, in a home setting of DTS surround, you are always placed at the center of music fed from different directions, and this really contradicts the impossibility that you can be surrounded in a live setting by a band playing for you alone.

Worse yet, China’s recording industries today are too obsessed with the hi-fi vocal thing, and this overdoing is exposed in a most affected, ostentatious way in those DTS surround music CDs I bought. The vocal intensity here has been exaggerated out of proportion, as the singer’s emotion-charged voice keeps surging out from the center speaker and reduces the music to evasive, perfunctory accompaniment.

A huge letdown though, I believe DTS surround can still be the best technology to achieve the live feel of some ambient music, big band concert or electronica, where you can really be the only king pampered and caressed by the moving arms of music!

Good stereo and speakers turn your living room in to a theater. We bought a foreign surround sound system as well and enjoy the movies back home (importing them ourself) we've got 7.1 stereo and when using THX it's like a dream. I agree with the DTS CD's (Chinese ones) they just copied the technology without knowing anything about it and I think this is why the problem appears. I've got some CD's from back home in DTS/DTS-EX and they sound great, it's just like being at a live concert.