"Club Penton" - Ask questions to Hollywood insider "Penton-Man"

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

What do YOU see as the advantage, if any, of (lossless decoding of) DTS-HD MA over TrueHD from a sound quality point of view?

I am not making any comment about the audio codecs in the poll which I asked to be posted, as I do not in any way desire to bias the feedback or results.

If you find the poll to be lacking in some sort of way, your choice is obviously not to participate at all.

[Penton-Man]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

Pretty sure it's on the DVD. They have raccoon faces caused by their "dirt tans". McQueen was one of my idols. Can you imagine making his Great Escape jump THAT bike? I think I read that he crashed doing it and they reshot it with a stuntman. He was a tough nut.

Ah, motorcycle history.
Bud Ekins (Steve’s good friend) did “the jump”.
See this article for the particulars……………
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...insobit14.html

For, the record, both Bud and Steve were fellow ISDT competitors , I think that fact is mentioned somewhere in the article above, with Bud being a multiple gold medal winner.
Steve was on time for a medal too but, got injured during his ISDT by avoiding colliding with a spectator who was riding on the supposedly ‘closed course’ in the opposite direction…………directly at him.

He was a fabulous motorcyclist with a true passion for the competitive side of the sport. His need for speed later turned to four wheeled vehicles.
Here are some unknown tidbits about his “need for speed”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLUvK...996D4&index=22

P.S.
I think he was a damn fine actor also.

[thebluemax]

I read reviews, but they do NOT influence my purchase of a BD.

I love the look of "Patton"

I hate TrueHD , all studios should use DTS-HD

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by thebluemax

I read reviews, but they do NOT influence my purchase of a BD.

I love the look of "Patton"

I hate TrueHD , all studios should use DTS-HD

Reasons being?

Since TrueHD = PCM Original = DTS-MA...

[thebluemax]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

Reasons being?

Since TrueHD = PCM Original = DTS-MA...

To my ears TrueHD lacks the punch that I hear from DTS-HD

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by Robert Harris

While I fully recognize that fact that in this economy studios are not about to junk older masters, I'm wondering when we're going to see the last of them.

It's "deja vu all over again." Some are talking DD versus DTS, as they were a decade ago. Also a decade ago plenty of folks were directing a lot of online scorn toward movie studios for recycling old video masters originally used for Laserdisc, broadcast, etc. and merely porting them directly to DVD. The Digital Bits launched a big campaign to promote anamorphic enhancement and the creation of new HD-quality masters to use as sources for DVD authoring.

Now with Blu-ray still young, we're seeing at least a few old DVD masters recycled for Blu-ray use.

[Esox50]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

It is frightening how similarly we think...

[PeterTHX]

Originally Posted by thebluemax

To my ears TrueHD lacks the punch that I hear from DTS-HD

Except that this isn't relevant to the codecs themselves, you prefer the mixes.

You want TrueHD punch? Try Cloverfield.

[Anthony P]

I have long suspected the real motive in eliminating grain was to improve the ability to data compress a movie more severely. A grainy image takes up a lot more space than a smooth image.

It's all about saving money. Costs can be reduced by squeezing the movie onto a BD-25 as a certain studio has done repeatedly with a lot of new and catalog BD releases. Costs will be lowered if one can squeeze both the movie and lots of extras onto just one BD-50 instead of creating two discs.

agree, but I think it is more about making crappy DL acceptable.

[sharkshark]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

Shark, my point was that there is no balance on some Blu-ray software forums.

Sure, but it was directed at my comment, using me as an example to Mr. Harris of someone without that balance. Respecfully, and humbly, I'm one of the least dogmatic here, or at AVS, or anywhere else I post, skeptical without seeking conspiricy. If anything, I'm ambivalent to a fault...

Still, now you're talking about fishies, I'll take that as a sign to move on...

It is not a matter of sweeping anything under the rug.

There is so much dirt on top of the rug that you can’t even tell what color or pattern the darn rug is.

Sure, but I didn't soil the rug. Nor do I keep kvetching about it without lying on it myself (uh, ie., I buy and enjoy my discs, even watching the whole movie rather than just selected scenes!).

Besides, "that rug really tie(s) the room together..."

P.S.
Have you ever been close to a shark (out of a cage) ?
If so what type and where ?

Only dive I've ever had with a shark was in Turks at about 80 ft... As a spotted eagle ray circled me (looked to be the size of a damn washing machine), I saw a slow, almost lugubrious gate of a 6ft reef shark about 40ft from me. Unless you've seen a shark swim nonchalantly underwater, you simply haven't lived (and, no, TV or even Imax doesn't do it justice).

The hope was to get to the Barrier Reef this December for the coral bloom and to do some shark diving, but having just bought a house it might have to wait a year. I want to go before the whole thing dies, some are giving it another decade before it's pretty much toast.

I cert'd in Jamaica, and on my first deep dive, with 300ft+ of viz, I saw a weird cloud up in the clear water that looked just like sky. The baracuda was just floating there, and my mind immediately thought of it as some sort of pointy, dark cloud. Insane. Also, ever seen a moray under water? The green is such a great "f-k off!" colour under water, again near impossible to replicate either with a pic or out of water... Something about that green at depth that just screams, "GO AWAY, MAMMAL...!"

Ever dived/dove/diven cold water? Up here, lake diving's a whole 'nother shebang compared to you fancy pants California stuff... Cold, zero viz, craploads of zebra mussels, and anything good is damn deep... A weird, weird hobby to be sure (one that almost killed me at 140ft down in the cold waters of Tobermory, but that's another story...)

[Mr. Cinema]

Originally Posted by PeterTHX

Except that this isn't relevant to the codecs themselves, you prefer the mixes.

You want TrueHD punch? Try Cloverfield.

The example I use for TrueHD is always the 2-disc Casino Royale. It's incredible, but so is Cloverfield.

[davcole]

Originally Posted by Mr. Cinema

The example I use for TrueHD is always the 2-disc Casino Royale. It's incredible, but so is Cloverfield.

I've always felt like that one, Kung Fu Panda and Cloverfield were the best of the TRUEHD tracks i've heard.

[horseflesh]

Originally Posted by thebluemax

To my ears TrueHD lacks the punch that I hear from DTS-HD

Yeah, because DTS is louder.

Penton, I predict a relative landslide for DTS. People just "think" it's better, I think because it was the big thing on DVD when it was introduced.
I'm not very technically minded, but unless someone can prove otherwise I presume Peter is correct with everything he says (of course he's biased, he wouldn't be doing his job if he wasn't, but he's not just making stuff up) and to the end user there is no difference apart from those 6 decibels.

[cjamescook]

Originally Posted by horseflesh

...I'm not very technically minded, but ...

Well, I am.

Why doesn't someone take a DTS output, invert it, then combine it with a synchronized TrueHD signal. The output of that combination is the difference between the two. Display that output on an oscilloscope, or a frequency spectrum analyzer to see the difference.

You can always twiddle the volume control on one of the two signals until the overall difference is minimized. Then, what you have left is the difference between the codecs.

[horseflesh]

Originally Posted by cjamescook

Well, I am.

Why doesn't someone take a DTS output, invert it, then combine it with a synchronized TrueHD signal. The output of that combination is the difference between the two. Display that output on an oscilloscope, or a frequency spectrum analyzer to see the difference.

You can always twiddle the volume control on one of the two signals until the overall difference is minimized. Then, what you have left is the difference between the codecs.

So what's the "technically minded" answer??
I really just think it's a placebo effect.

[SquidPuppet]

Originally Posted by Penton-Man

P.S.
I think he was a damn fine actor also.

Papillon (1973). Cinedome, Orange Ca. The coconut raft scene was the first time that I cried (and understood) happy tears. Hoffman was fantastic in his role as well. That could make for a purty Blu-ray.

[Doctorossi]

Originally Posted by SquidPuppet

Hoffman was fantastic in his role as well.

Ah, yes- the days when Dustin Hoffman was an actor. *sigh*

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by horseflesh

Penton, I predict a relative landslide for DTS. People just "think" it's better, I think because it was the big thing on DVD when it was introduced.

DTS gained its following because the company started out being more proactive in making digital surround sound popular and accessible than Dolby did back in the early 1990s. Much of DTS' popularity grew from what it did during the roll out of digital sound formats in commercial theaters back then.

When Dolby was developing Dolby Digital they saw the format as a cost saving replacement for 70mm projection in large market movie theaters. Many theaters equipped for 70mm only had it for the benefit of magnetic 6-track audio. I visited more than a few 70mm equipped theaters with very modest sized screens. Why make a $15,000 mag-coat print when you can use a $1,000-$3,000 35mm SR*D print for the same purpose? Movie distributors would save a lot of money on not having to strike 70mm prints. Ultimately they had a conservative minded plan: Dolby Digital for "flagship" theaters and SR optical analog for everyone else.

The downsides were the Dolby Digital hardware (the original DA-10 processor & reader) cost over $20,000, just as much as the then dying Cinema Digital Sound process, and the audio quality was nowhere near as good as 6-track Dolby SR magnetic. The DA-10 system was not very reliable either. Not many films were released with Dolby Digital in 1992 and very few theaters had systems installed.

DTS thought all movie theaters should have 5.1 digital surround, not just the important movie theaters in big cities. DTS introduced their theatrical sound hardware with aggressively low pricing ($2,500 for a DTS-S player and $3,500 for a DTS-6 unit) to get it into over 800 theaters with the release of Jurassic Park. Despite the "Vitaphone" criticisms, DTS' dual system approach worked well. The audio quality was arguably better since its 820kb/s data rate was 2.5 times greater than the 320kb/s rate Dolby Digital was using. That contest over bit rates, never mind the codecs behind them, would later bleed over into the home theater area with DTS and Dolby competing on Laserdisc and then later on DVD.

DTS theatrical had its own early problems. At least a couple hundred or more of the first 800 DTS installs were 4-channel systems instead of 6-channel. Every print of Jurassic Park had a copy of DTS' "Digital Experience" sound format trailer on it. So lots of theaters not even playing the movie in DTS ended up inadvertently advertising the format. DTS solved those problems by Spring of 1994.

Both Dolby and DTS were doing screwy things with the logos they were using to promote their digital sound formats, but finally got the marketing side of things fixed by summer of 1995.

Dolby has had rivals in movie theater sound in the past (such as Ultra Stereo), but DTS was the first rival to really challenge Dolby. I think a lot of people saw Dolby as the very well connected, old guard kind of company and they were certainly living up to that stereotype in the early 1990s. DTS appeared more progressive and that won over a lot of sound geeks. DTS gained more fans yet when it looked like Dolby was trying to prevent DTS from being included in the DVD format at all.

Ultimately the rivalry between Dolby and DTS has benefited fans of home theater because it brought a lot of attention to the good and bad sides of lossy compressed surround sound. I think it's one of the key reasons why Blu-ray was designed to support uncompressed, lossless compressed and very high bit rate surround sound. It may even be a factor in why Blu-ray was designed to operate at significantly higher bit rates than its now dead rival.

[sharkshark]

Good summary, but it makes me feel old... sigh...

Originally Posted by Bobby Henderson

It may even be a factor in why Blu-ray was designed to operate at significantly higher bit rates than its now dead rival.

uh, not sure that HD-DVD's bitrate was insufficient for either lossless format (heck, I had TrueHD and DTS-HD MA working on my HD-DVD setup long before my BD-10 or even my PS3, but that too is ancient history.)

Still, to your point, questions about bitrates obviously come to play with =lossy= codecs, where the more the data coming through the pipe, the less the compression (ideally), thus (again ideally) higher quality.

That debate about bitrate, however, is moot when it comes to lossy codecs. I find it pretty amazing in a forum that decries screenshots as pseudo science, giving lots of reasons why it's a poor judge of PQ, that comments regarding the "punchiness" of DTS lossless over Dolby Lossless go, for the most part, unchallenged. Comparing disparate soundtracks and attributing the advantage of movie A over movie B due to the lossless sound compression format seems to be, well, patently ridiculous. Heck, I DO prefer my Word files to be RAR'd rather than ZIP'd, they're "punchier" when I extract them!

That said, there may be other advantages (ability to extract a lossy core, say, or particular player abilities) that may sway people one way or another. Heck, once again the dialogue normalization argument may play out, something that's done at the mixing stage rather than the encoding stage if I understand correctly (ie., it's not an inherent disadvantage to one surround format versus another). Some may have a player that won't do DTS-HD MA to PCM, and thus can't, say, run room correction over their HDMI signal. Fine, a super reason to pick one over the other. But "punchiness"?!

That'd be like preferring the youtube rip of the latest blockbuster to the BD of Casablanca because it's more "colourful"... Compare apples to apples (ie., volume match, setup your system correctly) and I don't hesitate for a second to say that =sound quality= of lossless to lossless will provide ZERO cause to pick one over another. Nor, except for those concerned about not being able to fit content on a 50gb disc, will bitrate, which in the case of lossless will speak only to the efficacy of the compression algorithm, not the quality of the LPCM sound that's "unzipped".

[Bobby Henderson]

Originally Posted by sharkshark

uh, not sure that HD-DVD's bitrate was insufficient for either lossless format (heck, I had TrueHD and DTS-HD MA working on my HD-DVD setup long before my BD-10 or even my PS3, but that too is ancient history.)

Not nearly as many HD-DVD releases had lossless or uncompressed audio them. I don't know the exact rundown, but it appeared to me that most HD-DVD titles had lossy Dolby Digital Plus or a mix of older, lossy DD and DTS encodings. Likewise any Blu-ray movie stored on a BD-25 is more likely to be stuck with lossy DD audio rather than lossless Dolby TrueHD.