This got me really curious about what quality Netflix actually streams its audio, but the only thing I came across were tech support threads regarding low quality streams. Does anyone know of a good comparison of Netflix vs physical disc quality, and/or any hard numbers?
FWIW, I have an extremely good system and I've always thought that streamed audio sounds great. I honestly wonder if I've been missing out on the next tier!
What I recommend is having a DVD, Blu-Ray, and Netflix streaming of a movie with good sound and a lot of dynamic range that you can A-B-C with. Apollo 13 is a reasonable example and fairly cheap. :)
It's super obvious side by side, at least on my setup. Streaming is more-or-less DVD quality at best in my experience.
From what I've found, Netflix's highest quality audio is a lossy 640 kbps Dolby Digital+ (E-AC3) stream. For comparison, the highest quality BluRay audio would be the lossless formats Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD MA. Both of these formats support variable bit rate encoding, and from my personal library I'm seeing average bit rates of 4727 kbps for Atmos TrueHD and 2525 kbps for DTS-HD MA.
Dolby TrueHD is lossless, so the bitrate is somewhat irrelevant. DTS-HD Master Audio is also lossless, but "degrades" back to a lossy version if the decoding device does not support it.
The actual bitrate after decoding for a 24-bit 2-channel song with a 96kHz sample rate is 4.39mbps. With 5 channels, that's 10.975mbps (higher than a DVD for both picture and sound combined).
FWIW, TrueHD also contains a lossy core (AC3 in this case), just like DTS-HD MA. I was also surprised to see that my TrueHD tracks are 24-bit, but my DTS-HD MA tracks are 16-bit.
FWIW, I have an extremely good system and I've always thought that streamed audio sounds great. I honestly wonder if I've been missing out on the next tier!