Although I can’t answer your question regarding the authenticity of this Mortal Combat release, I want to note that you should verify the mix and it’s quality on priority. Whether the track is full-rate or half-rate DTS is secondary from a technical point of view since the difference in “transparency” (ability to distinguish it from a PCM source) will be minor to non-existent for sure compared to the difference which can occur due to different mixes they might have used (or screwed up). Just so you keep that in mind while hunting for the nominally best source.

The behavior of your recorder is interesting. I’m not totally sure but I doubt that usual LD-Players even flag the 14-bit DTS as such via S/PDIF. Af far as I’m aware, every LD-Player capable of outputting PCM is able to playback DTS indirectly as well since it’s encapsulated in regular PCM anyway. So neither should the recording device care, weird.

In general, if you have a desktop PC, I can recommend a cheap PCI soundcard with the CMI8738 or CMI8768 chipset. In conjunction with the custom driver by “D0gbert”, you can capture PCM, DTS and AC3 “bitperfectly” for less than 20 dollars which is quite nice.