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HD Movies on PC Speakers = Better sound?

post #1 of 3
2/14/07 at 4:32pm
Thread Starter 
I'm watching Star Wars HD. It's being run through a set top box via S-Video and RCA for Audio. It's attached to a Creative Xi-Fi Platinum Sound Card, and a Creative Gigaworks sound system..

Do different sound systems, and the quality of them give you more sounds than others?

I'm watching the garbage crushing scene, and I'm noticing sounds I've never heard before...unless they added stuff for the HD version.

For instance, the garbage actually CRUSHING as the walls push in... a 'Slimer' sound effect from RGB as the Dianoga eye plops back into the water... Deeper Bass for the wall startup sequence...

Where all these in the DVD version and they are just now more pronounced in the HD version?
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post #2 of 3
2/15/07 at 2:04pm

Re: HD Movies on PC Speakers = Better sound?

Neil - I don't have HD DVD so I don't know if the sound quality has been tweaked. Assuming it's not, here's a few scattered ideas:

- Your previous speakers were so bad that they didn't reproduce the soundtrack well enough; you're now hearing what was there all along.

- Your hearing become better, coinciding with your new HD DVD

- PC speakers are not especially high quality and will not reveal such nuances, except that your previous speakers were horrid (see above).

- The equalization of your new speakers are such that it's highlighting certain frequency ranges, drawing your attention to sounds you never much noticed in the midst of everything else.
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post #3 of 3
2/16/07 at 9:28am

Re: HD Movies on PC Speakers = Better sound?

Well, HD-DVD (and presumably Bluray) do have options beyond the fairly low-bitrate Dolby Digital options available on DVD. Not that the "normal" DD sounds bad, quite the opposite, but the HD formats have so much more space to work with that compressing the sound to the max and thus tossing away sound info isn't nearly as important.

DD Plus allows real 7.1 sound at up to 6Mbps (in reality 3Mbps on HD-DVD) and then there is Dolby TrueHD, which is completely uncompressed and should sound basically identical to the master recording.

Not being in the US I haven't quite gotten into the whole HD-disc experience yet, but clearly there are far higher definition options to the sound as well as the video on HD discs. What is actually on the discs I don't know, and finding that out is left as an excercise for the reader.
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