Recent content by Roger Dressler

One theoretical advantage in TrueHD's favor is that the decoder will never impose "remapping" of the surround signals into the fronts as can happen with 7.1 HDMA. Just give me the original tracks from the studio master, thanks.

Might have a look at the Turtle Beach X41. They have Dolby Headphone, but I've not heard them. I use an import version of Pioneer's IR wireless Dolby Headphone system, SE-DIR2000, since superceded by the 3000 IIRC. They sound exactly like wired phones. Zero noise. The connection is digital, not...

Are you using the same analog connection for the DVD tracks, or decoding them in the AVR?

Well, since the DEHT mix is completely different than the theatrical version, one would hope it sounded different. It's sufficiently different that it cannot be used to determine the effect of dialnorm, I would submit.

Your AVR can display the dialnorm offset from DD bitstreams on DVD because it sees that dialnorm data in the bitatream. When playing HD DVDs, the decoding is happening in the player, so your AVR only sees PCM, and cannot know anything about the dialnorm value. I cannot see how your AVR can...

The picture does not show a DTS-HD logo, so I don't understand how people conclude it decodes -MA. It's just a new style DTS artwork.

From your description, it seems there is a difference in the playback loudness of the two tracks, probably due to Dolby's use of dialnorn. In this case, you have to adjust your volume control up by 4 dB (probably, but it varies based on dialnorm setting) when switching back to the Dolby track...

There aren't any players that offer a switch for Dialog Normalization on/off. What is the annoyance it causes you?

Do they decode DTS-HD Master Audio, or just the core, or what? The Ver2 upgrade did not mention adding DTS lossless capability--or maybe I missed it.

DTS makes some DVDs, so they would be in control of the bitrates. They now report that most DVDs were made with half bitrate, 768 kbps. If you look at their info on DTS-HD, it says "All DTS-HD encoded content contains the original DTS 1.5 Mbps core," but in fine print it says "In certain...

I would say that given the capacities of these new formats, there's no excuse not to use 640 kbps for either format. HD DVD has the option to go higher, but you mentioned that there is insufficient space for TrueHD. At the end of the day, no disc should go out with unused bits after all the...

I cannot say that we have attempted to drill down to the 99th degree. There are some differences, such as the 3-block frames in HD DVD vs the 6-block frames in BD (at this data rate). I cannot tell you what that will translate to in sound quality, if any. We'll just have to listen carefully to...

There is no difference in how dialnorm is calculated between DD, DD+, and TrueHD. It's measured on the source PCM, then encoded into the bitstream.

Thanks much for this info. I'm really glad that both D-VHS and the Warner HD discs mark an improvement for you. I feel the same. Aside from the sheer increase in bitrate over LD/DVD, the encoder parameters are somewhat changed as they have more bits to work with. More of the data, for example...

I do not have enough experience in our R&D test lab to tell you my impression of that. I need to find some time to do so--I guess it is a rare privilege to have such A/B capability! Anything based on disc A vs disc B has too many variables to say for certain.