PCM Beats TrueHD with The Departed

[Josh]

Warner gave us the first chance to do a head to head comparison of TrueHD and PCM. The results are in:

Originally Posted by HighDefDigest

Out of the twenty comparisons (ten for him, ten for me), we could only detect differences on four scenes total. But of those four, we both always preferred the PCM track, if only a smidgeon.

http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/departed.html

[JTK]

...we both always preferred the PCM track, if only a smidgeon.

"Grrr...damnit, we had to give BD a begrudging bone as doing something better than HD-DVD."

Coming from these guys, I'm sure the actual reality is more than a "smidgen" of difference.

[Spankey]

Love this quote..

f nothing else, it made me realize that if all the studios dumped this dueling audio format business and went all-PCM, I can't say I would be likely to complain...

Now does anyone want to guess why?

[dobyblue]

Now, how do the PCM and TrueHD tracks compare? Given this historic opportunity, I decided to conduct a little experiment. I invited a friend over, who is a big movie and music buff, but not particularly technical. He knows good audio when he hears it, yet doesn't know a PCM from an RPM from R.E.M. In other words, he's Joe Six-Pack with a great ear. Anyway, together we conducted a "blind" audio test -- we select ten short sequences from the film, and listened to a compare of each. We took turns firing up each scene, and selecting which one sounded better, with no knowledge of which sample was the Blu-ray and which the HD DVD.

After writing down our answers on little scraps of paper (note that we didn't throw them into a hat -- we aren't that dorky), the results were interesting. Out of the twenty comparisons (ten for him, ten for me), we could only detect differences on four scenes total. But of those four, we both always preferred the PCM track, if only a smidgeon. For example, there is a scene in involving an attempted trade bust between the Costello character and a Chinese gang. There is a sound of a gun firing that we went back over a few times, and as silly as it sounds, the force and impact of the sounds was a shade more realistic in PCM. Also a beneficiary of the uncompressed mix is the music, as this is a film brimming with rock songs. The first scene we picked featured the Rolling Stone's "Gimme Shelter," and again the PCM track boasted a slightly more spacious feel to the music in all channels -- as if the very highest end of the frequency range was more palpable.

From Peter Bracke's review of both discs just now.


http://hddvd.highdefdigest.com/departed.html
http://bluray.highdefdigest.com/departed.html

[dialog_gvf]

^^^ Oh, the fanbois are going to go nuts.

[Longshot]

Bracke cannot say anything good about Bd without a "but". Dissapointing to hear the soundtrack overall is lacking and uninvolving.

[dialog_gvf]

I suspect Warner used the same LPCM on the BD as was pumped into the TrueHD encoder (which probably means they degraded the LPCM from the original). They are like that: Port the HD DVD limitations to BD.

My guess for the differences are due to the HD DVD players screwing up the pure LPCM in a mixing stage, while BD gives a pure output.

The HD DVD players are an audio disaster. So, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they couldn't even get TrueHD right.

Gary

[Spankey]

Gary, does dialnorm come into effect with Dolby True-HD?

[dialog_gvf]

Kris Deering posted a possibility. The Toshiba decks upsample the PCM to 96/24 before output to the HDMI. That may be the difference.

Gary

[HDTV1080P]

I remember back in the days when DVD first came out and I preferred the soundtrack of the 2.0 PCM Laserdisc over 2.0 Dolby Digital DVD when watching music videos. High bit rate PCM on BLU-RAY sounds good since it uses no digital compression. No data loss compression algorithms that restore the exact original audio back to the studio master should in theory sound just as good or slightly better then high bit PCM. Did that title have a higher bit rate then 24 bit 96khz for PCM? DTS HD might sound better then True Dolby.
One day hopefully some one will do a comparison between the quality of True Dolby, DTS HD, and high bit PCM. It would be interesting to see which one sounds better. Someone should create a master demo test disc using the exact same source material. Have 3 separate BLU-RAY 50GB discs with one labeled True Dolby, one labeled DTS HD, and one labeled PCM. Then on each of the 50GB discs you place the maximum bit rate each format is capable of and lets see who wins.

[LembasBread]

yeah, the fanbois are grasping at straws. Scratching their heads over how the possibility of a compressed "lossless" codec can sound different than an uncompressed, raw one. Am I the only one who's ever questioned the quality of MLP/TrueHD? I know it sounds fantastic - better than I've ever heard 5.1 audio with music and DVD-Audio discs are a real testament of that. But, until 5.1 uncompressed PCM was made available to consumers MLP was the only way consumers could hear multi-channel lossless audio and had nothing to compare it to. I'm glad we have other methods now and Dolby/MLP ain't quite the big kid on the block anymore.

I think they screwed MLP up when they revised it to TrueHD. They implemented their metadata techniques like dialogue normalization and the ability to have a core AC-3 DD track to be extracted from the TrueHD. They may have tinkered with it to the point that at the "lower" bit rates it plays at on HD DVD, something is different, which can be heard (according to HighDefDigest) on The Departed, a movie that isn't really too accoustically dynamic or aggressive.

[Deciazulado]

Hey! Why are members here atacking each other? (hey BL even deleted one post calling someone retarded and then reposts it??) Chill. Will I have to suspend you both? You keep making it personal.

And wasn't this thread about PCM being better or not?

[Brad Ley]

Originally Posted by Deciazulado

Hey! Why are members here atacking each other? (hey BL even deleted one post calling someone retarded and then reposts it??) Chill. Will I have to suspend you both? You keep making it personal.

And wasn't this thread about PCM being better or not?

Apologies.

(and for the record, I didn't call Peter retarded, I called the idea that I should be the responsible party to verify his fact retarded.)

[PeterTHX]

That's the most retarded thing I've ever heard!??!!?!? I merely asked for confirmation of something you asserted and I'M THE ONE who is supposed to prove or disprove your statement????

If you insist on playing a semantics game then show me where I said Toshiba was forbidding others to make HD DVD players?!?

I said: THAT is an oxymoron for HD DVD. Just try to buy a Full Functional player that isn't Toshiba made and talk to me about choice (LG is "crippled" remember?).

Which then YOU took to mean something else and then said: So you're telling me (and can prove) that Toshiba are the only ones making a full featured HD-DVD player because they have locked out any other manufacturers from making their own?

It therefore falls on YOU to prove they don't since YOU opened that can of worms.

[Josh]

We're done here.