Jeez Paden501,
Bits is bits, some say. The sound should not be that much different. Though I have heard that DTS (the reason Sony put it on their high end DVD releases whose name escapes me) can be encoded at multiple bit rates, so maybe there is more bits on Bluray.
There are varying levels of DTS quality; the highest level at this time being DTS-HD Master.
Your DVD case may provide detail about the formats of audio encoding on disc.
Check out this link to the
DTS FormatsAs for bits, more is better but there is a point where the difference cannot be
detected by human ears. High quality consumer recordings today are available in
24 bits, but Master recordings use even greater bits. In addition to bits, there is the sampling rate
which is how often the audio signal is analyzed and recorded.
Fwiw, yes, SACD is 1 bit encoding but it is a completely different technology that would derail
the discussion.
I've included a
Link to wikipedia on
Pulse Code Modulation as well as an excerpt from the doc:
Pulse-code modulation (PCM) is a digital representation of an analog signal where the magnitude of the signal is sampled regularly at uniform intervals, then quantized to a series of symbols in a numeric (usually binary) code. PCM has been used in digital telephone systems and 1980s-era electronic musical keyboards. It is also the standard form for digital audio in computers and the compact disc "red book" format. It is also standard in digital video, for example, using ITU-R BT.601. Uncompressed PCM is not typically used for video in standard definition consumer applications such as DVD or DVR because the bit rate required is far too high.
Modulation
In the diagram, a sine wave (red curve) is sampled and quantized for PCM. The sine wave is sampled at regular intervals, shown as ticks on the x-axis. For each sample, one of the available values (ticks on the y-axis) is chosen by some algorithm (in this case, the floor function is used). This produces a fully discrete representation of the input signal (shaded area) that can be easily encoded as digital data for storage or manipulation. For the sine wave example at right, we can verify that the quantized values at the sampling moments are 7, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 14, 15, 15, 15, 14, etc. Encoding these values as binary numbers would result in the following set of nibbles: 0111, 1001, 1011, 1100, 1101, 1110, 1110, 1111, 1111, 1111, 1110, etc. These digital values could then be further processed or analyzed by a purpose-specific digital signal processor or general purpose CPU. Several Pulse Code Modulation streams could also be multiplexed into a larger aggregate data stream, generally for transmission of multiple streams over a single physical link. This technique is called time-division multiplexing, or TDM, and is widely used, notably in the modern public telephone system.
There are many ways to implement a real device that performs this task. In real systems, such a device is commonly implemented on a single integrated circuit that lacks only the clock necessary for sampling, and is generally referred to as an ADC (Analog-to-Digital converter). These devices will produce on their output a binary representation of the input whenever they are triggered by a clock signal, which would then be read by a processor of some sort.
