Ah the glory days of Home Theater (1 Viewer)

[Aaron Garman]

Hello all. I know now seems like a glory day for Home Theater, but I still remember those days when it was an elitist group of people. I was just reminded of the way things were when I watched some laserdiscs today. Jurassic Park on DTS laserdisc is just something truly incredible. Long live laserdisc! Anyone else have memories of laser-land?

AJ Garman

 

[Elbert Lee]

I do feel a bit of nastalgia, but I'm very happy to be part of the age of DVD and less expensive software! There are some downsides, though.I love to demo my HT to those I know, but with dvds, everyone has seen all of the good films. In the days of LD, people were always eager to see a movie on my system....

Also, with cheaper software and more surround formats, it's very hard to avoid the upgrade bug. but, it's always fun to upgrade...

Elbert

 

[Marty Lockstead]

My glory days of laserdisc are still going on in terms of HT demo materials. A couple months ago I ordered a copy of Goldeneye with DTS/THX off ebay...Damn does it sound good! In fact, it sounds better than any dvd version ever will unless the format can find a way to use less compression when encoding discs. Now don't get me wrong, at the very least, my dvd transfer of Goleneye is far superior, especially since I can watch them with progressive scan on my system. But I can't deny the obvious audio advantage to my laserdisc.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

Bah, these are the glory days of HT. More and more material coming out on DVD, at prices hitherto unheard of (with at least one heavy hitter, Mr Lieberfarb, lobbying for further drastic cuts in DVD prices). High quality projectors are coming down in price. Speaker count is at 7.1 and rising. SVS is making subwoofers.
Sure, it's not the elitist days of HT, but things have never looked this good - except that some studios are beginning to release pan&scan only DVD's, a huge warning signal right there that things may be headed in the totally wrong direction.
I'm happy with the state of HT as is, but... with the aforementioned pan&scan debacle and the spectre of the new digital "thou shalt not have any fair use of material" laws looming on the horizon, things may still go downhill though. :frowning:

 

[Andrew_Ballew]

My glory days of laserdisc are still going on in terms of HT demo materials. A couple months ago I ordered a copy of Goldeneye with DTS/THX off ebay...Damn does it sound good! In fact, it sounds better than any dvd version ever will unless the format can find a way to use less compression when encoding discs

Like I posted elsewhere earlier- there is no technical reason Laserdiscs should sound any better using a lossy-compression format like DTS or DD than DVD's. If there was a DVD version of Goldeneye with the exact same mix as the Laserdisc, encoded at the 1509 bit rate- It should sound identical, if not perhaps a little better (likely not, though) considering that DVD's carry the native DTS datasteam, while Laserdiscs carried DTS hidden in a 1411kbps PCM stream.

my thoughts-

Andrew

 

[Westly T]

Well I sure none of you miss the disk side change or loading multiple disks during the movie! I remember one movie that I had with 3 disks, 5 sides, but the video quality sure was good! Thank goodness I had a player that played both sides of the disk, but the pause was a bit longer then DVD layer change!

 

[RobertCharlotte]

Here's a question that just occurred to me: did LD makers do a better job of locating breaks between sides than DVD makers seem to do of locating the break between layers?

(fixed a doofus grammar error)

 

[Michael Reuben]

did LD makers do a better job of locating breaks between sides than DVD makers seem to do of locating the break between layers?

It wasn't much different: Some sidebreaks were well-chosen, some were ridiculous. The Blade Runner Director's Cut was a notorious example. Side (or disk; I forget which) break right in the middle of Decker's chasing Zhora.

M.

 

[RobertCharlotte]

Ahh, the good old days.
Thanks, Michael!

 

[KeithH]

I sold my Pioneer CLD-D406 LD player, Sony MOD-RF1 demodulator, and all 21 LD movies a few months ago. As for the "glory days", I remember a time when I thought a $250 JVC RX-778V receiver with no DTS decoding and no 5.1-channel inputs, Kenwood bookshelf speakers from 1989, a Sony DVP-S330 DVD player, and a 27" GE TV with no S-video or composite video inputs was all I needed. :rolleyes

 

[Danny Tse]

I still remember my days of hooking up my AudioSource Dolby Surround(not even Pro-Logic) processor to my Sony integrated amp's tape loop, and running wires to my Radio Shack Realistic Minimus 7 surround speakers. Ahhhh....memories! The X-Files 1st season episodes on laserdisc. Now that I think about it, I still have all of the above items, save the AudioSource processor. And they all still work too.