FLAC vs. DTS HD Master Audio: What's the Difference?

[Tweety.Abd]

Both are lossless, so I were wondering what's the difference between the two.

[Nima]

I don't know in which aspect you want to compare, :think:

DTS-HD MA is codec created by DTS company and it's an optional audio format for bluray disks and nowadays it is used on the BD disks widely.

Both codecs you mentioned are lossless and there are almost the same, DTS-HD MA can be up to 24-bit and 192kHz at maximum 5.1 channels and 24-bit 96kHz at maximum 7.1 channels, and FLAC is almost the same.

And if your question is why for example they do not use FLAC instead of DTS, it is different story.

One reason is the commercial one, because FLAC is free and might not be supported in all DVD and Bluray Players, so, they get (buy) license from DTS to publish their movies on this codec. ^_^

The another reason is because of a nice DTS feature as I'm going to explain, the thing is that actually it contains 2 data streams, one is DTS "core" which is lossy and the second part is some how the difference of the lossy one to the original bit-to-bit one, the benefit of this feature is that when you put a DTS-HD MA movie in the DVD/BD player, if the player supports the lossless format, it will be played as Master Audio and if does not support, it goes back to the "core" which is lossy, thus, you can play such a movie in almost any DVD/BD player, because even the very old ones support DTS lossy, but you can not have such this feature in FLAC format. ;)

So, as you see, DTS is much more famous and more supported by the players rather than FLAC, but if you want to discuss about the "quality", there is no difference between them (if both are them are encoded in same depth and sample rate), you can decode DTS-HD MA in your computer with proper software and if you decode it and encode it to FLAC, you will loose nothing, you still have the original bit-to-bit exact soundtrack. :)

Hope you understand. ;)

[Tweety.Abd]

I were referring to differences in terms of quality, and thank you so much for your explanation :)

[Pedrito]

I think the major difference between these two is that FLAC has better compression. The quality of the sound itself is the same, since both are lossless. :)