Fooling yourself about 5.1 soundtracks... (1 Viewer)

[Cary P]

Dolby Digital reference quality? DD or DTS?

The fact is, both of these formats are compromised by lossy compression schemes, and are nowhere near reference quality.

I'm always disappointed with DVD releases of older movies that do not include the original sound mix in PCM format. I believe the current DVD spec allows for this.

There have been a lot of anecdotes on this board over the years about how inferior some DVD's sound compared to their laserdisc versions, and I tend to agree with these comments.

I also recall reading about some experiences with music or concert DVD's where the viewer felt that the 2 ch PCM track matrix decoded by Dolby PLII or Logic7 sounded much better than the included discrete DD or DTS tracks (I believe it was the Beatles Anthology).

I am in total agreement that the new HD-DVD format needs to include a spec for multi-channel PCM soundtracks or some other lossless scheme, or it will be compromised from the start. Does anyone know if the standard setting DVD Forum will address this issue, or is it even on their radar?

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Toshiba reps have discussed a desire for high-resolution multichannel audio (ala what's on DVD-A) to be a part of the AOD/HD-DVD format they are developing.

NICE!

 

[Jonathan Dagmar]

even if HD DVD does have DVD-A style hi-res audio, I seriously doubt it will be taken advantage of very often. Studios will more than likely continue to port thier Dolby Digital and DTS tracks from the films thatrical run, at least on the majority of releases.

 

[Topher]

I also recall reading about some experiences with music or concert DVD's where the viewer felt that the 2 ch PCM track matrix decoded by Dolby PLII or Logic7 sounded much better than the included discrete DD or DTS tracks (I believe it was the Beatles Anthology).

I agree with this statement. I was watching Tenacious D, The Complete Masterworks the other night and just for kicks decided to select the PCM stereo option, then fiddled around with my reciever and tried PLII and NEO:6 and thought it sounded WAY better than the included 5.1 mix on the disk. Same thing with my BareLaked Nadies disk.

 

[Michael Reuben]

Studios will more than likely continue to port thier Dolby Digital and DTS tracks from the films thatrical run, at least on the majority of releases.

If the term "port" is meant to suggest that the DTS and DD tracks on DVD are a straight dump of the theatrical code, then it's an incorrect description of what happens. Theatrical and home DTS are completely different codecs; theatrical and home DD 5.1 run at different bitrates. In both cases, the sound must be re-encoded for DVD, usually from uncompressed masters. For a more detailed description of the process, see this recent post by an HTF member who works at Technicolor as a professional sound mixer (the remainder of the thread is also relevant).

M.

 

[Dan Hitchman]

Yup,

The soundtracks start out as digital uncompressed PCM (or sometimes in the case of Sony studios, DSD) masters (some have been near-field remixed for home theater environments). These high resolution digital masters could be encoded in MLP and included as the primary soundtrack on HD-DVD easily (and Blu-Ray, but with Sony as a heavy hitter we're likely to see DTS as the best soundtrack they have to offer unless they try adding DSD bitstreams).

There is enough room for at least DVD-Audio specifications for PCM which are a maximum of 6 discrete channels at 24/96 and stereo at up to 24/192. If they fiddle with space allocations and don't try to cram TONS of extras on the disc with an average length movie on a dual layered disc they could just as easily place 8 channel discrete PCM at 24/96 using MLP.

Dan