Cast Away - HDD.com may be starting to see the light!

[FilmmakingFiasco]

Originally Posted by MatrixS2000

But the whole point is that a lossy track, even though it is good is NOT equal to a lossless track. We have tons of example so this...check out any BR disk with a lossy track vs a lossless track.

I have U571 on DVD - imo that has a really great soundtrack (DTS) but I am looking forward to the day where I can get this with a lossless track because I know there will be an improvement.

I appreciate your effort on rating the stars and I agree with you how it could be scaled and the rather large "containers" it creates. I think your second scale would be a much more accurate way of rating things. As you move up the scale, the requirements would get much more stringent, etc.

Imo the difference between DTS and DD+ would be less than the difference between DTS/DD+ and a lossless track. So by giving DD+ a rating near lossless, we are now open to DTS being included. The entire point of HDM is to bring the user a higher definition experience - both audio and video. For some reason audio continually gets the short end of the stick.

PS - thanks for keeping the conversation around the topic, not the poster.

The High Def 2.0 Awards gave the best audio to Transformers. Again, I stress that I have yet to hear this disc (and probably won't ever since I'm not interested in this film) but it seems, for some odd reason, that the audio just really was as good as a lot of people have thought. Once more, it just depends on where the upper echelon sits on a reviewer's scale. http://www.n4g.com/News-90330.aspx

The Aviator was released with a DD track for Blu-ray and a DD+ on HD-DVD. In highdefdigest.com review, they gave the audio 3 stars. So, as reviewing these tracks go, it's not like mediocre audio tracks are being labeled wrong, it's just been that for Transformers, the audio was really good, even at DD+.

And who knows what Paramount would've done for the Blu-ray version. They've been so wonky, first offering MPEG-2 conversions of everything, to later move to AVC. On their audio, they only had DD for blu-ray for early titles and eventually added PCM but even some of their later titles were planned at DD only.

This same issue is going on within Warner. Their codecs for films and not always releasing lossless audio (The Aviator for example) shows that with two formats, one being less equal, that Blu-ray is going to statically be screwed over several times. Warner was nice enough to give PCM to 300 and to The Sopranos but as you said, every one of these titles needs to be mastered in a lossless format as well.

This is why Sony, Fox and Disney are the top tier titles. Each title can be made with Blu-ray, and only Blu-ray in mind from the beginning and a plethora of audio options, sometimes for many, many languages, can be added.