Dts-ES - Digital Theater Sound - Extended Surround. It is a 6.1matrixed system enabling to deliver extreme spatial effects that literally surround the audience. A rack-mounting DTS-ES decoder creates a back surround channel from encoded surround tracks, in typical theatre applications feeding a back surround (BS) speaker array (configured as left-back-wall and right-back-wall for stereo operation). The system is compatible with all current extended surround formats and an auxiliary surround channel is also provided for other applications. ES modes can be selected via automation inputs or via the built in DTS timecode reader, which detects ES serial numbers for automatic DTS-ES playback.
Instead of 5.1 channels, DTS-ES adds a sixth channel, which requires a sixth speaker that is positioned directly behind the listener's head. With DTS-ES, the speaker arrangement is front left, front center, front right, surround left, back center, right surround (6 channels), and, of course the subwoofer (.1 channel). DTS-ES comes in two flavors: DTS ES-Matrix, and DTS-ES 6.1 Discrete. DTS-ES Matrix extracts the sixth channel from cues that have been embedded within some DTS 5.1 Digital Surround soundtracks. On the other hand, DTS 6.1 Discrete decodes a DTS soundtrack that has the additional 6th channel information present as a separately mixed channel. To accommodate backwards compatibility with home theater receivers that may not have DTS-ES Discrete decoding or processing, a receiver equipped with DTS 5.1 Digital Surround will automatically fold the matrix or discrete 6th channel of information into the left and right surround channels of a 5.1 channel speaker setup.