The differences in codecs between 448kbps DD and DTS was negligible, it was simply down to how a movie was mixed.
Not according to my own testing. From memory, I noticed a massive step up in performance. Wasn't DTS available up to 1.5Mbs? Here comes the old adage from the car engine world, there's no replacement for displacement.
Anyway, that's harking on about the past. Phil, like I said before, I understand the need for this, but surely in looking forward Dolby should have looked at their newer sound formats as a construct to provide audio to
all consumer systems over broadcast, that of tiny TV speakers all the way up to 5.1 (let's forget everything else for now for the sake of simplicity and the nature of the application). If Dolby Digital Plus was used as a basis, more efficient algorithms used to provide reasonable quality, surely all the acoustic treatment could then be done at the decoder end with the knowledge of the system (and its limitation) in use.
Also the audio stream is so small compared to the bandwidth required for FHD video, I'm not sure where savings could be made, unless this ties in with more video codec 'enhancements'. OK, and we've witnessed this before with massive reduction in picture quality compared to when FHD broadcast first started, especially over satellite.
I appreciate you were there, saw a demo, but that's not a real-world application where the intention has been re-interpreted by a broadcaster. So I'll politely sit on the fence and see what happens. I believe it's pretty late to the party and doesn't sit well with all the talk of massively increased visual performance; for me the audio performance should go hand-in-hand.