Neither LD has Dolby Digital it seems. You can see the back of the U.S laserdisc here.
The movie poster only shows DTS, (and DTS stereo) so it might be one of those releases that had no Dolby Digital theatrical mix at all. Non DTS theaters would have played it in DTS Stereo, which was Dolby surround compatible.
I guess LDDB is wrong about the US laserdisc. In any case, you’re right - there was no Dolby Digital theatrical mix, only DTS.
Progress update: I have successfully converted the DTS files to seperate mono WAVs for each channel. Slow and steady…!
I’m really surprised that hackers was not one of the early titles released on Laser Disk with AC-3 ( aka. Dolby Digital ). The decoding hardware arrived in stores fall of 1995 while the software arrived early in that same year with Clear and Present Danger, True Lies, Forrest Gump, StarTrek: Generations, and Stargate. All of those being 1994 releases. Hackers was released in theaters fall of 1995, so in my opinion it was in a perfect position to get the AC-3 treatment for Laser Disc. Studios were really picky in those days.
Also, movies are not mixed in Dolby Digital, DTS, or SDDS. The studios contract the digital sound companies to make recordings of the studio masters. In the early days, studios only contracted one and some times two digital sound companies to make recordings, wich was why Hackers, was just a DTS only Movie. In the later years most all 35mm movie prints featured all three digital sound formats- Dolby Digital, DTS, and SDDS.
The DTS cinema format is pretty simple and straightforward. It is a 4:1 waveform compression codec very similar to what radio stations use in their
music servers. The audio is encoded in 16-bit 44.1kHz form with 5.0
channels encoded at a data rate of 820kb/s. The LFE signal is actually
recorded in the surrounds and filtered to the “.1” output via a crossover
filter. Since commercial cinema surround arrays are usually very limited in
low frequency response, this method works okay and makes the audio
compression of the format more efficient.