You are aware of the fact that DTS uses half it's usual data rate on DVDs, aren't you? If this were not so, it would crowd out some of the bit pool used for video.

DD= sucko DTS= sucko, but less suckage

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The Soundhound Theater

[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited February 19, 2003).]

quote from b.bass:my experience with mastering engineers is that unless you stand there the whole time...with a gun....he ain't gonna hear one word of such instructions.
i don't believe there are that many like that. i was a video master/edit engineer...ok, a looong time o go... but i enjoyed what i did...maybe it's cause ...nahhhh. granted, we mastered on 2" quads...my earliest were the awesome ampegs (dange...were it ampex?...mst be the vodka)
the 1200 & 2000. the 2000 was just so clean an editor. later, doing shows and arty things...they had...oh dear; RCA, TR-50's. i did all the usual maintenance for the four used in production. come in at six..power up big things...go get coffee..stand around or find cleaning stuff and alignment tapes. tubes should be settled by now...at least one hour. and on it goes. you had make sure the right head was cuttin in on the right field..no, the first field...if ya misaligned at this step...well, during the real edit...your gonna see the kingston trio make some real errors as their colors go into a black hole...congrats..ya jst blew an edit and ya gotta go back the master anddd back up to the previous edit and lay all that down again...this can be a real drag if your just doing audience shots for segways to thenext piece. we'ed try for at least 30 minutes of the show ready by the end of a day...sometimes a whole hour came of it!
but...i listened to the producer in how he wanted a piece to transit...had to, had 4 machines backed-timed and rolling...and the timer on each was a mechanical counter...the timer wuz me!..and it took .6 seconds for an edit to take from the time your finger made the button 'click'.
but... i cared. so did the producer...who stood right there with me all day to make sure he liked it to!

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t higg

sorry for the apparent encryption of my post. strange.

my point was that with no competition (as dolby is used to having none, being the 8 million ton gorilla), the state of the art would be worse than it is and would stay that way for a much longer time.

meridian ran to dolby with their lossless packing scheme and suddenly it was adopted as the system to use for dvd-a, despite other available methods that we'll never hear about.

is it back compatable to cd? no. will it play on a dvd player? no. is it being promoted? no. dolby loves status quo. it's lucrative. the only push dvd-a gets is from fear of the competing format.

the only 2 existing patents to do with digital bass management were both patterned around dolby's ancient system that was designed for theaters. how well is it working out? is it adaptable to dvd-a/sacd?

i just think that dolby (who have sewed up digital tv and movies) doesn't care much about audio. it's frustrating to me that the dominant force is the inferior product.

we waited years too long for dvd-a because they couldn't watermark the software with a system that hackers couldn't beat, then they released it with the ridiculous analog out format with no bass management. that was only because of sony's pressure, or we'd still be waiting.

i'm glad for sacd, dts and the outlaw icbm. that's why i support all 3 as much as i can.

thigg: sorry, my friend. i was only being general. there are good mastering engineers, to be sure. especially in the analog days that you mention. you HAD to care. you had to be good at it, too. i don't know what it is with digital. seems like lesser talent can get by through digital machinations (witness hip-hop with samples, no musicians, heck, you don't even have to be able to sing). the fact that the release of dark side of the moon in hi-rez multi-channel is so anticipated... a 30 year old record...and no new material that's been written exclusively for the format instead, says a lot about the situation to me.

sorry for the rant.

The world would be a lot better without either Dolby Digital or DTS - they're both lossy compression schemes, and nothing can change that. To hear uncompressed audio, the only options for consumers are SACD, DVD-A, CD and ironically, ProLogic on Laserdisc. Of course DTS sounds better than DD, but it still can't match an uncompressed track. That's too bad. Perhaps if more research had been done on providing uncompressed audio on DVD, things could have been different.

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The Soundhound Theater


[This message has been edited by soundhound (edited February 19, 2003).]

16 bits x 12 khz x 2 = 384 kbps

vs.

256 kbps mp3

Bitrate isn't everything. All digital formats are, by definition, lossy in the true sense. It's more, IMO, a matter of what and how much to toss, rather than blindly loving high bitrates. DTS isn't really a very sophisticated encoding algo.

I suppose if you look closely enough analog is really lossy too, it's just harder to exactly quantify how.

There is alot at play here. DSOTM was to be released on DVD-A but Sony offered to do the mastering and EMI agreed. I'd love to know what happened behind closed doors for that one. Personally, I'm really disappointed in this turn of events being an adopter of DVD-A. I'm going to have to look for a universal player.

There are some small labels (AIX Records, for example) that are recording and producing material specifically for the hi-rez format. I'm a Yes fan and their last release, Magnification, was recorded at 96/24 and 192/24. It is really well done.

I may be being somewhat of a snob, but is there alot of music being made today that should be coming out in hi-rez?



[This message has been edited by DollarBill (edited February 20, 2003).]

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charlie: what do you think about analog vs digital in a pre/pro?
supposing you had a universal player with good dacs.
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Dbill: a company called heads up produced spyro gyra's 'in modern times' on sacd. it was done with the format in mind from the start and is truly a masterpiece of a production, imo. they've signed hiroshima to do a sacd multi disc to be released soon.

from the discussions i had with dvd-a people 5 years ago, they plan to mostly remix existing masters because it's 'more cost effective' than paying for full production of a disc from scratch and hoping anyone cares to buy it.

that's why i switched to the sacd camp. though, i must admit, i envy you the 'fragile' album in multi channel hi rez.

sony's strongest selling point is using dsd to archive as it can be easily converted to any digital format, past, present and future (1 is divisible into any number).

hmmmmmm...i wonder what master tapes EMI has that might be worth something??? remember wacko jackson bought the mccartney/lennon library in the 80's and it became part of the huge deal he signed with sony soon afterward.

tommy lee jones in MIB "...i'm gonna have to buy the white album again."

Obviously I'd rather a universal player without DACs - pipe the data via a digital interface, but if that wasn't (as it currently isn't) an option I'd rather have an analog multi-channel preamp (not really a processor at that point) and full range speakers all around.

If I went with the 950 right now I think I'd do like someone (Merc ?) here did and also insert a Sony analog preamp between 950 and amps, via the unity gain bypass input. Then tie the DVD-A into the Sony.

It's my understanding that, although the data for the 6th channel in DTS-ES(?) is in fact a discrete stream the 'center' (6th channel) info is ALSO matrixed into the surrounds for backward compatibility with older DTS decoders. This leaves the obvious problem that an ES decoder must remove the matrixed material from the surrounds, but the matrixing was done pre-compression, so the common signal still in the surrounds after compression will almost certainly not be the same as the 6th channel data after compression. This seems like a great chance to get some artifacting, given the right set of signals.

I can see the marketing advantage, and also the clear difference in trade-offs, but it would be hard for me to love either solution.

Part of good engineering is understanding and staying within design constraints. I wonder how DTS would sound at 450 kbps or what Dolby could cook up for 1.5 mbps.

Very likely the superiority of DTS would cease to exist. Frankly, I'm surprised Dolby hasn't simply hit back by increasing the data rate of DD. Maybe they don't think they need to, given their lock on the market.



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The Soundhound Theater