A poll has recently been opened on the Blu-ray.com forum to gauge whether members think that Sony Pictures Home Entertainment should drop Dolby TrueHD as lossless audio codec on its future Blu-ray releases and start using DTS-HD Master Audio. According to insiders, Sony is checking public interest on the issue, although no decision is imminent.
Currently, DTS-MA is being commonly used by Disney, Fox, Lionsgate, MGM and Universal. In turn, Dolby TrueHD is the standard for Paramount, Sony and Warner.
The eventual choice of DTS-MA over TrueHD won't affect owners of a player that supports both formats. The sound quality of a lossless track doesn't depend on the codec used, just like a compressed computer file will be identical once opened, whether it came in a .zip or .rar file. However, for owners of earlier players (some of which can decode Dolby TrueHD but not DTS-MA), the use of DTS-MA may limit their access to lossless audio.
The PS3 decodes both Dolby TrueHD and DTS-MA, but can't bitstream any of them over HDMI to an AV receiver for it to decode the audio. Most of the latest-generation standalone players can both decode and bitstream TrueHD and DTS-MA.
The issue can be further compounded technically if we bring up codec efficiency (how big the respective audio files get), authoring, processing power needed for decoding, and other factors.
Sony has been putting lossless audio on all of its titles since the inception of the format in June 2006, initially as uncompressed PCM. The studio started using TrueHD in June 2007, and the codec has been the lossless standard for the studio since 2008. To date, Sony has only released one title with a DTS-MA track: '
Close Encounters of the Third Kind', which also included a Dolby TrueHD track.