Great Week for High Rez

This week sees perhaps some of the most significant releases on DVD-A that there have been for a long time now.
Not only is the Beatles "Love" CD/DVD-A released, but also The Doors long-awaited 6 album Boxed Set, containing 6 CD and 6 DVD-A.
As if that is not enough, the David Crosby album "If I Could Only Remember My Name", again as a CD/DVD-A dual pack.
All the DVD-A discs have glorious 5.1 surround in 24/96 resolution.
Could be an expensive week.

Also add to this the Bass Communion "loss" album, CD/DVD-A, although this one is 24/48 in the 5.1 area, as well as 24/48 PCM & DTS

(Not bad for a supposedly "dead" format, is it!)

 

Not bad at all, hopefully the releases are also as good as we are hoping - haven't seen any reviews yet.

 

Well, both my Beatles & The Doors are apparently on the way to me..
Will post a review - as will many others - at www.quadraphonicquad.com
This is the best multichannel audio site on the web
Have you signed up yet, and if not - why not

 

For Canadians, HMV has a one day sale, today, on the Beatle's "Love" $9.99 with coupon.

Wow, that Door's "Perception" is EXPENSIVE!

 

But not really.
It's 6 CD and 6 DVD-Audio discs, making 12 discs in total.

 

Wilkes,

I gave up rebuying my music collection after everything went to cd. I have crates full of LP's and cassettes, and not enough room to setup all this equipment . Perhaps I should dig out the old Technics and see if it still functional? LOL

You have revived my interest with this thread. Please explain the difference between DVD-A, SACD, and HDCD as I do have a question for you. Will SACDs play in a HDCD (Toshiba SD-2200) compliant player? Which one of the 3 will give the best sound?

As for the "Doors", they put out an HDCD (Absolute Best) which is more in my price range.

Thanks in advance for your reply.

 

HDCD requires a suitable CD player.
As do both DVD-A and SACD. If the player you have does not specifically state it will play these formats then you can be certain it won't.
HDCD is supposedly a way of mapping 20 bit audio to a CD, which is at 16 bits resolution. It has since been bought out by Microsoft, and I don't know too much about it.
(A similar, but higher quality thing can be done with DTS-CD. In stereo mode, this allows encoding a 24/88.2 resolution stereo file to an ordinary CD-R disc. It would need to be played back through a DTS decoder though)

As far as Universal players go, this is your best route.
A Universal will play any 12cm shiny disc you throw at it (In theory. Some are better than others in reality)
My Denons have been great - 2910 and a 3910.
As far as what is the better format, personally I would say DVD-A every single time. SACD is allegedly an improvement over standard CD, but IMHO it is almost unlistenable due to the noise shaping. There is little above 23KHz apart from a lot of noise, and SACD sounds better with an LPF set to around that value. It's because it is a single bit system, designed as an archival format & not a playable one.

DVD-A is like hearing what was heard in the studio.
Awesome.

 

But is (was) that the DVD-Audio... - or the CD...?

 

The Beatles Love CD did not work in my Toshiba (came up as disc error), but did in my Discman. This has always been perplexing to me. Some cds work, some don't.

The DVD-A is absolutely awesome. The sound is so clear and true, I'm really impressed.

Jjolsen, yes that price was for the cd only, sorry about that. Apparently, it went down to around $5 on Boxing Day. I don't have a HMV in town, only scan their ads.

 

This may be down to Copy Protection, or else because the CD is very long - older players do not seem to like very long discs too much.

It's very well done indeed. Here's hoping we see the rest of the catalogue.....

 

Hi Wilkes,

I agree with your comments about SACD wholeheartedly. I bought 2 SACD's and stopped. To my ears it sounded like a child had been playing with a graphic equaliser. Some bands are accentuated whilst others are almost buried. And what SACD does to the placement of sounds in a stereo image is bizarre. Maybe its just my notorious Pioneer player but when I pick out an instrument and listen to where it sits in the mix when playing the CD layer its in one place and then I listen to the SACD layer and its in a different place. I notice it with any song I choose on both my SACD's.

I cringe when I think of the poor folk who have bought hundreds of these devil's spawn discs. Its not their fault, Sony told them it was high res audio! I am grateful in a way that the hi res revolution has had a slow start as it has given a lot of us time to stand back and listen before investing serious $$$ in upgrading our collection.

I then read John Watkinson's bible (The Art of Digital Audio) after you mentioned his criticisms of SACD and learnt about different classes (A,B,etc) of amplifiers which came in handy when I purchased a new amp as I listen to music at relatively low volume.

DVD-A is defintely the way to go. I think readers of this forum should keep in mind that you need decent gear to really appreciate (or even hear sometimes) the difference. Good mid price range gear will suffice. You need a decent player, amp/receiver and speakers. Its important to have quality at all levels from the recording in the studio right through to the sound waves hitting your ears (another thing I learnt from Watkinson). So don't go buying a Sony stereo from Wal Mart, ask for advice from someone in the know (like Wilkes) or walk into an audio specialist shop (but don't let them sell you expensive cables).

A question for you. There is no 24/96 stereo mix on Love. Is this because there was was not enough room considering the length of the album for both on the DVD-A layer?

 

They have the stereo track at the DVD-Video side "for backwards compatibility" and there's not room for a 24/96 PCM track in the AUDIO_TS folder as well. But they could possibly have squeezed it in as 24/96 MLP, or replaced the 16/44,1 PCM in the VIDEO_TS folder with 24/96 PCM (standard DVD-Video can play that). Or at least 24/48.

 

Good point jjolson. They could have replaced the 16/44.1 PCM in the VIDEO_TS folder with 24/96 PCM. I suppose it was the old concern about piracy. Considering the 16bit CD can be copied I can't see what the big deal is about protecting a 24bit version of the stereo track. The kids are pirating via CD-MP3 anyway. Most of the music DVD's available are 16/48 which is a waste of the high resolution capability of the DVD format. Record companies could have started releasing all their catalogue on DVD as 24/96 when the format first appeared (adding a photo collage for video) and have made squillions of dollars by now. They didn't do that because they lack business sense. Thank god for CD, when albums are remastered properly they sound damn good, not as good as 24/96 though.

 

It's because the space simply isn't available.
Audio_TS has 24/96 at 5.1, which is around 4.392Gb in space, before we add in the track stills which are admittedly negligible.
Video_TS has the following streams:
Dolby Digital 5.1 = 0.3GB
DTS 5.1 = 1.449Gb
Video stream at least 2Mb/sec = 1.236Gb, at 3Mb/sec = tips it over the limit. (Total combined streams with 16/48 LPCM at 0.966Gb)
Therefore, the Video stream has to be around 2Mb/sec, which explains the static images not changing. It also gives a total size of the correct value for this DVD as reported in Explorer.

Increasing the Audio in stereo to even 24/48 tips it all well over the maximum limits for a DVD9.
Adding a downmix to the MLP stream also tips it well over.

 

Thanks for the figures reagrding LOVE. So that disc has at least 7.1 gig of data and as your link shows DVD-9 has a maximum storage of 7.95 Gig (I keep forgetting this is the real size of a DVD-9).

 

What we also have to figure in is that the maximum space on the Video_TS also has to be less than the total available space on a single layer as well.
Otherwise we will get a glitch in the middle of a track somewhere.
Sure, DVD-A can be authored as PTP instead of OTP, and when doing a commercial title this is generally how I send the masters to replication, as it allows me to put more data on Layer 1 than on Layer 0.
This works like this - Layer 0 = Audio_TS, Layer 1 = Video_TS.
So with 80 minutes of music, we have to squeeze this onto a single layer, or else there will be glitches in the Video_TS.
Add in the following streams:
LPCM Audio 16/48 at 1.536 Mb/sec, or 24/48 at 2.35Mb/sec
DD 5.1 at 0.448Mb/sec
DTS 5.1 at 1.509Mb/sec
We still need the video stream (which cannot be a slideshow) so we're dreadfully close to the limits.

Interestingly enough, it is actually debatable if this title can be called DVD-Audio.
1 - There are no links into the Video_TS (Out of spec)
2 - The VTS streams have 3 audio streams, and this is also out of spec.

 

What we also have to figure in is that the maximum space on the Video_TS also has to be less than the total available space on a single layer as well.
Otherwise we will get a glitch in the middle of a track somewhere.
Sure, DVD-A can be authored as PTP instead of OTP, and when doing a commercial title this is generally how I send the masters to replication, as it allows me to put more data on Layer 1 than on Layer 0.
This works like this - Layer 0 = Audio_TS, Layer 1 = Video_TS.
So with 80 minutes of music, we have to squeeze this onto a single layer, or else there will be glitches in the Video_TS.
Add in the following streams:
LPCM Audio 16/48 at 1.536 Mb/sec, or 24/48 at 2.35Mb/sec
DD 5.1 at 0.448Mb/sec
DTS 5.1 at 1.509Mb/sec
We still need the video stream (which cannot be a slideshow) so we're dreadfully close to the limits.

Interestingly enough, it is actually debatable if this title can be called DVD-Audio.
1 - There are no links into the Video_TS (Out of spec)
2 - The VTS streams have 3 audio streams, and this is also out of spec.

ALso, none of the reasons for missing 24/96 streams can possibly have anything to do with Copy Protection, as the 24/96 MLP files are not protected at all. No CPPM.

 

I think he meant that they didn't put any 24/96 in the DVD-Video part because it's copyable.

I was also a bit too generous with space on the DVD-9, I guess you could only replace the 16/44,1 PCM track with a 24/48 MLP track, and they didn't think that would be a better selling point (though 24/48 is way better than 16/44,1.

They could have done like AIX Records usually do, splurge out for a DVD-14...

 

Yes that is what I meant. I probably confused the issue by discussing the available space on LOVE and then mentioning my criticism of the lack of available 24/96 stereo DVD's. They obviously made the best decision with LOVE as something had to be left out and I suppose a high res stereo track was the least desirable. But its silly that LOVE has 3 multichannel formats and 1 stereo format. Personally I am a fan of high res stereo so I would have preferred either stereo 24/96 on the DVD-A layer or on the DVD layer. Such is life.

Another example is the DVD-A release of Koyaanisqatsi by Philip Glass. That runs close to 80 mins. There is 24/96 multichannel on the DVD-A layer. The length meant there was no room for 24/96 stereo on that layer as well (though they didn't realise this when they were printing the artwork. The artwork states both!). However on the DVD layer there is only Dolby Digital 5.1. They could have fitted stereo 24/96 on that DVD layer as well but they didn't do that and I suspect that is because it would have been able to be copied. What a shame.

Think about this as far as music only is concerned. Why have both 5.1 Dolby Digital and 5.1 DTS on the DVD layer? Sure DTS is a lot better than Dolby Digital but its still a lossy format. And not every DVD player decodes DTS anyway. You can have the highest quality mutichannel on the DVD-A layer. Put 24/96 stereo on the DVD layer (along with Dolby Digital 5.1) and drop DTS altogether.

For movies you can have the traditional 16/48 stereo and 5.1 Dolby Digital and 5.1 DTS (if you have room). I don't care too much about sound quality with movies. I am into music, especially hi res, so I want both high res stereo and mutichannel when it comes to double albums. As HD-DVD will solve those space issues altogether its just a matter of time. Unless of course the record companies get hung up on piracy issues and send themselves broke. I'll be interested to see what Warner Music comes up with. Stereo is back in vogue. Have a look at the increasing sales figures of stereo amps.

 

The LPCM is at 16/48, not 16/44.1 - DVD-Video cannot use the 44.1 group of sample rates.
Cannot replace this with a 24/48 MLP either, because this would be in the Audio_TS, not the Video_TS, and therefore only accessible to those of us with DVD-A players.
The ideal solution is the 5.1 & 2.0 streams both in the Audio_TS as MLP streams, using PGC blocks so both streams are embedded in the same group (This is not the same as a downmix), and also having 16/48 LPCM, DD & DTS 5.1 in the Video_TS.
Trouble here is that to have all 3 streams in the Video_TS means that if we are also having an Audio_TS, the VTS titles need to be double authored or else we are out of spec (A VTS can only have 2 Audio streams in it).

HD DVD will NOT solve these problems.
It will be a strictly minority thing at best, and not even that much unless the studios actually do the following:
1 - Make something desirable available in HD DVD only, and
2 - Reduce the cost of hardware & software to the same as SD DVD.

What a strange thing for a music fan to suggest!!
DTS is streets ahead of Dobly Dirgital in terms of reproduction & sheer quality. Personally, I would rather a DVD15 or a DVD18 than dropping the DTS streams.
Tell you what - go play a DD stream against a decent DTS encoding of the same music making bloody certain that the DTS & DD streams are both from 24 bit source files.
The difference is like the difference between night & day.
Drop DTS?
Never.
Drop Dobly Dirgital? Why not! To keep the disc spec legal, use a stereo LPCM stream as Audio 1 and the DTS as Audio 2. All players made in the last few years are DTS capable, and every DVD-A player certainly is. Additionally it is impossible to buy a new multichannel amplifier that cannot decode DTS.
So instead of dropping the superior DTS, drop the dobly - it sounds like crap, and the licensing is frankly a joke.