DTS-HD MASTER AUDIO 5.1 lossless playback

[CreeperKong]

I have a UHD BDMV disc containing a remastered 1983 animated movie with following sound track content

track 1: recreated audio in DTS-HD MASTER AUDIO 5.1
track 2: scanned original 1983 optical sound track in mono PCM

But I found out that DTS-HD MASTER AUDIO 5.1 does not have same quality as on my PS5. Bass tone is muddy a lot when decoding in DTS Core compatibility mode, worse than track 2 in my feel.

This is most likely an encoding issue at studio side(never experienced this on other discs).

May I ask is there any player/decoder(opensource ideally) to get the audio decoded in lossless way, or converting to open format such as FLAC?

[dcoke22]

I think ffmpeg could convert a DTS-HD MA track to FLAC.

[tomty89]

But I found out that DTS-HD MASTER AUDIO 5.1 does not have same quality as on my PS5. Bass tone is muddy a lot when decoding in DTS Core compatibility mode, worse than track 2 in my feel.

What are you comparing against the PS5 though? Are you even sure it's really just decoding the DTS Core?

Also, are you actually playing it to a 5.1 speaker system? Or just 2.0 stereo? Could be just downmixing differences.

[CreeperKong]

What are you comparing against the PS5 though? Are you even sure it's really just decoding the DTS Core?

Also, are you actually playing it to a 5.1 speaker system? Or just 2.0 stereo? Could be just downmixing differences.

I use a Yamaha 5.1 audio system. I tried pass through the DTS audio stream to S-PDIF to force it fallback to DTS Core on a Sony UBP-X700, it results in same muddy audio. When I changed settings to let the player decode the audio, it becomes fine.

[tomty89]

same muddy audio

Again, same as what (gives)? I mean, many/most open-source / freeware software players on PC uses ffmpeg/libavcodec (or something based on that, like LAV Filters on Windows) for AV decoding, which should be able to fully decode DTS-HDMA. (Although I'm not quite sure about VLC, which seems to tend to stick with dedicated old libraries like a52dec and libdca.)

May I ask is there any player/decoder(opensource ideally) to get the audio decoded in lossless way, or converting to open format such as FLAC?

If you have yet to test it with a player that is known leverage ffmpeg/libavcodec for DTS (HD/HDMA or not) decoding, such as mpv (note: not mplayer), you may want to do so and see if it also gives "same muddy audio". If not, then obviously you can use ffmpeg (with or without any kind of frontend / UI).