[AndrewFischer]

After posting over in the DIY forum, I went back and looked at some DVDs I've got sitting around. I found one that has 48KHz 24-bit linear PCM and DTS 5.1 as the ONLY audio tracks. I've never seen that before. The Linear PCM sounds quite good.

Sorry about the poor captures. Only had 2 minutes of battery left on the camera.

 

[infinitesymphony]

I figure that if there's extra space for it, the people who author the DVD will at least give you PCM stereo.

I haven't looked at any DVD-V discs for linear PCM instead of AC3, but I know that all of the Porcupine Tree DVD-Audio discs have PCM stereo tracks.

It makes even more sense for a disc where audio is the main feature. Since most people know that DTS is superior to Dolby Digital (and pretty much every DVD player can now internally decode DTS), they'll often omit the DD track. In the case of the anime series Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the regular edition discs are DD while the special editions have two discs: one for DD, one for DTS.

 

[Jasper994]

The movie industry made Dolby Digital a standard for DVD movies quite a while back (IIRC it was the standard set for the DVD from the start). There is no such standard for concert/music DVDs so when sound quality is a big concern and there's not a lot of space, Dolby Digital will sometimes get dropped.