Sleeping Beauty BD - 2008 (1 Viewer)

[Vern Dias]

Sorry, David, but I think you have been drinking the lossless cool aid

When you have limited bandwidth and relatively high distortion, all the lossless will do is to preserve the original limited bandwidth and distortion.

Believe me, the original SB sound track was no great shakes and wasn't that pleasant to listen to, even in 6 track mag. None of the Disney tracks of that era were. Remember also that we are not talking PCM here, but rather magnetic sound which was purposely bandwidth limited for the printmaster.

The remastered track is far superior in all respects to the original 6 track mix.

Obviously this discussion could easily take on the aspects of $5000.00 speaker cables so I am going to leave it at this point.....

Vern

 

[DaViD Boulet]

Vern, you're totally missing my point. I never said that the remastered track wasn't better sounding... read my review at dvdfile if you want to see just how much better I think it sounds.

My point is that the PCM master of the 4.0 soundtrack sounds better than the dolby-digital version of that same signal.

That has nothing to do with whether or not the newly mastered soundtrack sounds better than the 4.0 mix.

 

[Mike Frezon]

David's point here is simple and quite logical:

"Garbage in" to a lossless format will sound better than the same "garbage in" to a lossy format.

All things being equal at the source...it will always be better to save the source in the highest resolution feasible. Further deterioration (by way of compression, etc.) will only make things worse.

I think lossless tracks on 1.0 mono tracks also make all the sense in the world.

The whole point of BD technology is to take advantage of the space on the discs to improve the audio and video presentation. If studios aren't going to do it, they are short-changing the entire raison d'etre of HD technology.

 

[cafink]

David's argument makes sense to me. Of course a lossless track from a source with limited frequency and high distortion will not sound as good as a lossless track from a source without those problems. But it will sound better than a lossy track from a source with limited frequency and high distortion.

 

[Vern Dias]

I am not disputing that lossless doesn't sound better than lossy. Only that the source doesn't justify it in this case. Believe me, you wouldn't be impressed with the lossless version in this particular case.

Also note that lossy comes in many forms with bitrate choices ranging from 64Kb to 640Kb. The resulting audio quality can vary significantly depending on the bitrate and the bandwidth of the source.

A track with limited bandwidth will require far less info be discarded in the compression process and will suffer far less degradation.

Comparing LD PCM with DVD DD generally means that you are comparing the PCM track with DD encoded at the lowest possible bitrate.

Much as we all want lossless in one form or another for every audio track on every BD, the realities of space require that compromises be made.

IMHO, in this case, this is a valid compromise, taking into account the realities of BD media and authoring.

Vern