I'm so glad Blu-ray won and not HD-DVD

[ryoohki]

Originally Posted by skrill

I would take a well-mastered, well-engineered audio track in lossy format over a dull track in lossless.

Lossless is not some holy grail. If the master audio track is garbage -- then the result will be garbage (without some extra studio time in a sound engineering booth).

I was just watching Mission Impossible III on HD-DVD (got it from my local blockbuster for $8), and I was amazed by the sound design. The imaging, the LFE, the dialog, all excellent. And it is in DD+ (1.5mbs encode -- btw the blu ray version of MI:3 was in regular DD 640kbs encode -- but all reviews say that it is also an excellent track), if it was in lossless would it have sounded better -- maybe/maybe not. But it sounds fanatastic as is. This is do to hard work and excellent engineering by the audio specialists at the studio.

Now - compare to Full Metal Jacket (Deluxe reissue) on blu -- that has an uncompressed PCM and it sounds like crap. It's lossless, but the track is entirely front heavy, very little imaging and poor use of LFE.

Lossless is fantastic and I always select the highest resolution track available on any disc -- but lossless is not a replacement for good sound engineering, mixing and design. Effort and engineering = a good track. Not which codec is used.

This is not a red v. blu debate -- just saying that a lossy track can sound stupendous. And a lossless track (with lazy engineers) will sound just like a regular crummy DVD.

That said -- I too am glad that Blu won -- now we can move past the format war and get some good catalog releases (LOTR, Starwars, etc.).

Well yeah of course, but please don't tell my that Bourne, King Kong, Transformer and other high class newer release on HD DVD have enought of a DD+ track. The good enought was ok on HD DVD, but this is Blu-ray and people expect the best... Personnally i won't buy a release without it. Unless it's a Nature show witch in my mind don't require it..

I mean even Halloween have a difference between the PCM vs DD. Altought it's not that big, still there and it's all i'am asking