I think we came to the same conclusion regarding the foobar plugin. It's a little half-baked. I never noticed any errors other than the surround channel clipping, but the output was definitely different than the winamp plugin, even for the L,C, and R channels.

I don't think the DTS specs are completely useless though. They give a clue to the analogue processing in the system, which has to be accounted for when decoding.

Setting the surround speaker output 3dB lower, at 82dB, in the mixing studio, hypothetically means that they're encoded 3dB hot. This also suggets that setting the mixing studio LFE at 88dB leads to the encoded signal being 3dB less than what should be heard when decoding.

Unfortunately, the DTS Encoder Suite won't let you apply that 3dB cut at the encoding stage for DTS HD-MA.

Anyway, boosting by 3dB always sounded weird to me which is why I left it alone before.