new xbox 360 add on problems.

[vick vega]

HD-DVD re-encodes audio to AC3 regarless of input (DTS) - BAD for audiophiles

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"Unlike DVD, where typical players pass the audio data from the disc through to your receiver, HD DVD requires that players mix sounds from menus and such in with the audio being played for the movie. The 360 player software decodes all the above codecs in software, mixes anything that needs to go together, re-encodes it into Dolby Digital and then sends that to your receiver. So, don't be alarmed when your receiver still says "Dolby Digital" even if you've selected DTS in the menus. "

This is direct from microsoft. Full excerpt here: http://blogs.msdn.com/xboxteam/archi...gence-day.aspx


The fact that they will convert all Audio to AC3 is seriously bad. It Means those movies with better soundtracks will suffer a loss. A good example of this is DTS audio.. DTS audio is a much larger file format and is less compress than AC3. A good comparison example would be.. DTS = CD Wave and AC3 = MP3.. AC3 is a compressed format. A good DTS audio track found on current dvd's could be for example approximately 1.1 gig, the equivalent AC3 track (dependant on bitrate) would be around 400 MB. While for music many claim MP3 to be the same, for the Low/high frequencies found outside of the music spectrum like what we need to drive our sub and astute sounds in a movie sound track DTS is a much better sound. Basically the Xbox 360 will be compressing the audio mixes to AC3, and from what they are saying because they need to also integrate the sound of the dash/alert popups during the movie, all audio will be recompressed to AC3? I hope this isn't correct, but that means it will take an original AC3 soundtrack and recompress it to another AC3 soundtrack with the addition of the dashboard sounds. Thats like Recompressing an MP3, or a JPG. Lets hope this isn't the case.. But it is bad news for the audiophiles who love their DTS.

Also since the CPU will both be decoding a very CPU intensive H264 video codec while also re-encoding all audio on the fly, the CPU fans will be running loud. if I have no media in my Xbox360, I still find the sound of the fan running demos, or sitting at the dashboard to still be annoying.
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