Faulty sound encoding....? (1 Viewer)

Hi all,

I seem to remember reading that early HD-DVD titles had a problem with the sound being encoded much too low (Warner titles?). Is this correct? Is there a listing of the effected titles somewhere? Thanx!

At least the first three Warner titles were encoded 10db lower than normal:

Phantom of the Opera
The Last Samural
Million Dollar Baby

- Steve

Thank you, Steve....

I'm glad I ran across this thread.

I just watched Million Dollar Baby (My first HD DVD experience!) and I had to crank the volume up much more than usual. I started thinking "what have I gotten myself into?".

Then I popped in King Kong and it sounded great.

I was just experimenting with soundtrack levels this morning. I have a HD-A2 hooked up via HDMI to a Denon AVR 2807.

I used Digital Video Essentials to calibrate the PCM(DD+ and DTHD), and Bitstream(DTS,DD) soundtracks to 75db at 0.0db on the master volume level.

I find that at this calibration level, a satisfying soundtrack is somewhere around -15db on the volume knob. Pretty much every HD title I tried was around the same level for volume. This morning I tried Phantom of the Opera, and at -15db it is insanely quiet. I had to turn it up to 0.0db to get it to about the same level as the other discs. I was pretty sure it was the encode on the disc, since this does not affect any of my other titles. It's good to read this thread, as it confirms my suspicions.

In a somewhat related topic, I noticed that when watching my SD DVD of Star Wars Episode III, it sounded rather quiet at -15db. I noticed that the reciever showed 'Dialnorm -4db' for this disc, and sure enough, if I cranked up the volume to -11db, it sounded about right. I popped in the SD DVD of The Return of the King, and played the DTS soundtrack, and the reciever showed no dialnorm offset, and it sounded about the correct level at -15db, as expected.

Is the offset to the dialnorm a common thing?

I guess it is too much to ask to have Warner re-whatever these discs. :frowning:

-4 db is the standard setting for dialog norm. Probably 90% of movies encoded with Dolby Digital use this setting. As for Phantom of the Opera, it may have intentionally been mixed with a lower average level so that the peek levels were louder.

Doug