Anyone investing in a home theater setup needs to pay close attention to the formats their gear supports. Samsung, for instance, doesn’t supportDolby Visionon its TVs, which might be a potential deal-killer for people considering the company’s ecosystem. I know it is for me. I also prefer devices that offer some form ofsmart homeintegration, even if all it means is the ability to shuffle music or open an app with my voice. That’s actually the main reason I own a pair of HomePod minis – it’s more efficient to say “Siri, open YouTube” than use a remote to turn things on and scroll through a sea of app icons.
When it comes to 3D surround sound,Dolby Atmosis omnipresent. It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, that you might be forgiven for thinking it was the only spatial audio format on the planet. But what’s the state of its main rival, DTS:X? Can or should you build an audio system around it? The situation is looking pretty dire, but the format isn’t extinct yet, either.
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On the hardware side
Starting on a semi-positive note
Certainly, DTS:X still has a reasonable amount of hardware support. It’s not difficult to track down speakers, receivers, and TVs that offer the standard. Budget options include brands like Hisense, TCL, and Vizio. Going into the mid-range and high-end tiers, you’ll find options like LG, Denon, Yamaha, and Panasonic, although LG has dropped DTS:X from its 2025 TV models.
You’ll also find DTS:X on a few Blu-ray players from the likes of Panasonic and Sony. Blu-ray itself is on the decline, but if you prefer physical media, it’s still possible to build a DTS:X disc collection. There’s a big asterisk on that, which I’ll get to in the next section.
DTS:X still has a reasonable amount of hardware support, but if a company sells surround sound products at all, it probably supports Atmos.
What’s difficult to ignore is that Dolby Atmos has even wider hardware support. It’s so commonplace that it’s almost pointless to name brands – if a company sells surround sound products at all, it probably supports Atmos. Some prominent names have intentionally left DTS:X by the wayside. Sonos, for example, doesn’t support anything better than DTS Digital Surround, even on its state-of-the-art Arc Ultra soundbar.
You can find both formats on computers, smartphones, and game consoles, yet once again, Atmos has the edge. DTS is entirely absent on Apple device – it’s not listed in the specs for iPhones, MacBooks, or the Apple TV 4K, which is otherwise well-liked for its home theater compatibility. It’s also missing from some other media streamers, like the Roku Ultra and Google TV Streamer.
It’s sometimes possible to get around compatibility issues via bitstreaming. The PlayStation 5, for example, doesn’t offer native DTS:X, but can push audio elsewhere for decoding. The very fact that I’m talking about workarounds is a bad sign, mind you – speaking of Macs, it’s like trying to fix the dearth of games on that platform by relying on emulators and virtual machines.
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The content dilemma
A dwindling selection that’s bound to get worse
The primary issue with DTS:X is a shortage of movies and TV shows to use it with. During the brief window when Blu-ray was available but streaming hadn’t yet taken off, DTS was the dominant home theater audio format, preferred by most of the major studios. The script flipped when Dolby Atmos arrived in homes in 2014, a year before DTS:X. Dolby seems to have made all the right moves in ensuring Atmos would become de facto for streaming 3D audio. Indeed, the only major US service that supports DTS:X today is Disney+, and many new titles are only available in Atmos, such as Andor and Daredevil: Born Again.
you’re able to, as I said, build a collection of Blu-rays with DTS:X, but you won’t get to be picky. A June 2025 tally onFlatpanelsHD’s Blu-ray database counted just 116 DTS:X discs versus 616 with Atmos. At the time, the only upcoming DTS:X release was a steelbook version of Serenity, the 2005 Joss Whedon movie. That’s hardly encouraging if you want to be sure you can enjoy both the latest movies and all-time classics.
It’s not clear how DTS can recover unless it becomes cheaper and simpler to adopt DTS:X than it is Atmos.
There’s a Catch-22 at play, most likely. Studios aren’t putting out DTS:X mixes of their movies and shows because there isn’t a large audience with compatible equipment, but that audience won’t buy the hardware unless there’s enough content to consume. It’s not clear how DTS can recover from this cycle unless it becomes cheaper and simpler to adopt DTS:X than it is Atmos, and DTS doesn’t have a business model if it can’t turn a profit from licensing codecs and other technologies.
Something I haven’t touched on yet is music. While services like Apple Music and Amazon Music support Atmos, DTS:X is non-existent in the music space. It’s pretty much exclusively a home theater format, which gives hardware makers even less reason to bother with it.
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What are the future prospects for DTS:X?
Dark, and getting darker
It seems to me that we’re witnessing the format’s last gasps. There’s such a shortfall in compatible content that hardware makers are slowly abandoning it, with no sign of a turnaround coming. If I were building a new home theater system from scratch, DTS:X wouldn’t factor into the equation.
If I were building a new home theater system from scratch, DTS:X wouldn’t factor into the equation.
Will Dolby Atmos rule unchallenged within a few years? Maybe, but maybe not. Google and Samsung recently announcedEclipsa Audio, an open-source technology with an advantage over both Atmos and DTS:X – it’s royalty-free. That won’t matter much if compatible content doesn’t follow, but streaming services and hardware makers alike are going to be tempted by the chance to save money and still deliver 3D sound. If it gets adopted by services like Netflix and Disney+, that could put Dolby on the backfoot for the first time in ages.
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