Surround Sound Data Rate?

[MissyC]

Hi,

OK I admit it, this question is for an assignment I'm working on for University but I'm struggling to find the answer to it and I would really really appreciate anyone's help.

I need to find out the data transfer rate of 7.1 surround sound. It doesn't particularly matter which standard of surround sound it is as long as I get it correct, although I'm guessing Dolby should be the easiest to find info on.

So far I've found a little snippet on the web that hints each channel of Dolby sound has a transfer rate of 448kbps if the sound is of 44.1kHz 16 bit quality.

Does this mean that to work out 7.1 i multiply 448 by 8? to get the overall rate per second? Would this be the same for a home cinema set up when surround sound is played via DVD?

I'd be so grateful if someone could help!

Thanks
Claire


i've posted this both in the cafe and multimedia

[ksv]

As far as I know, the encoding standards used on DVDs are 2.0, 2.1 and 5.1.
The data rate of a surround stream depends on the technology used, but maximum, and commonly used bitrate for AC-3 (Dolby Digital Pro) 5.1 DVD audio is 448 kbps combined. DTS 5.1 for DVD has a max data rate of 1,509 Mbps. Note that DVD audio uses 48 kHz sampling, so the 1,509 Mbps data rate for all 6 channels equals that of 2 channel FLAC encoded PCM audio such as AIFF.
DTS' relatively non-perceptual Coherent Acoustics algorithm for use in cinemas has a max bitrate of 4 Mbps at up to 8 channels.