Are laserdiscs worth getting or am I better off with DVDs?

thanks...

 

Damn. Maybe I'd have more luck finding a Laserdisc player with an on board DD/DTS Processor.

 

You're out, again....there never was DTS or DD on-board players. The DD signal, embedded in an RF channel had to be moved out of the player due to interference with the player. DTS maybe could of been on-board but DTS didn't show up till the last 3 years of LD. Processing was in head units, rightfully, in that era.

 

The 4 channel quad mix has never been on any home theater release. They've all only had the stereo mix.

 

Another one for Pink Floyd completists:


David Gilmour plays on this.

 

Another one David Gilmour plays on.

 

I bought the Deep End LD. I had seen it offered in the $100 to $75 range. Since I have the VHS I knew it was a great concert with top sound mix.

So one year around my birthday I decided to buy some things for myself that I had wanted for a while but not purchased. I found some quadraphonic LPs that had been on the want list. Grabbed clean copies and this LD grabbed it for $50 with no obi.

Turns out it looks worse than my VHS copy. The LD is actually from a VHS tape. Very dull and grainy picture, no winder they gave it a B&W cover!

I sold that sucker off a year or so ago, got my $50 back out of it.

 

The benefit being that modern receivers have no problem decoding the DTS audio. I always loved the DTS and DD bumpers at the start of the discs.

 

The DTS bumper certainly sounded spectacular but I loved that Dolby Digital one with the helicopter flying to the DD Cinema.

 

I don't think I have that one. The train one is good to to wake the neighbors.

 

Wasn't the helicopter one, the first one they made. It was on all the original AC-3 LD's. It ends at the Dolby Digital Theater. It was noisey! Are ya sure we're not on about the same one...?

 

The Train came later.... I never watch AC-3 LD's anymore. I watch old Academy Ratio films mostly.

 

In other words, stuff like The Third Man, Kurosawa, Fellini, many MGM classics, silents, Casablanca, etc.

 

Just won on eBay: The Beatles 1966 Budokan Show

As has been mentioned before it is the only official release of this video. Has not made it to DVD. Was it even on VHS? To my knowledge it was LD/Beta only, and Apple only released it in Japan (why?)
$20, significantly less than I've seen it go for in the past although going by previously sold listings it may not have been so expensive as I remember/expected.

 

I don't believe that's true. We were told at the time by Pioneer product specialist Greg Kalsow that they came out with the digital Dolby AC-3 audio adapter just to allow people who had old players to upgrade their systems. The insides of most (but not all) Pioneer players was actually fairly well shielded. As far as I know, the biggest issue was cost, because Pioneer was desperately trying to keep the retail price of their players down, and an integrated AC-3 decoder would've been a big additional cost.

I know that Pioneer had a ton of complaints from people who had older players, no adapter, and tried to play AC-3 discs only to encounter the AC-3 signal hash channel 2. All of this is reported pretty accurately on the Wikipedia page on Laserdisc; if you have information to the contrary, I'd like to see it. I know Pioneer was not happy about being crunched for bandwidth when consumers were clamoring for discrete surround sound.

 

The only player that had AC-3 demodulation was the MSB-Silver, a Panasonic LX-900 modified clone. It had the demodulator in a separate little box hung on the back wall of the player. Their website said it had to be outside because of possible RF interference issues. I extrapolated that tidbit into the bigger picture of interference. Also, RF leakage from LD players caused a problem for me on occasion. I was always able to solve it by changing the rack position of somethin'.

If I had been Pioneer, I'd of made AC-3 LD's like DTS did, replace the PCM with Dolby Digital and let the analog channel carry a compatible, Dolby Pro Logic or stereo program. Then you wouldn't need the demodulation stage. But, that's in retrospect....

 

No, 20 bucks is a good buy. Think I paid $60 for my copy about 10 years ago. The first edition has sort of a deluxe black cover and is hard to find. The more common white-cover version is much easier to track down. Content is identical on the two.

 

Got it with the black & silver outer jacket so I guess I scored no OBI, but eh... That/the jacket would just be a bonus to me, I only want to actually watch it so for $20 I'd take anything haha.
This is natively video, right? Some of the bootleg DVDs are probably sourced from bootleg VHS copies, at best copied from LD itself, but there are probably more than a few out there taken from kinescopes or video copies of kinescopes - yikes!

Interestingly enough it appears as if there is a 30 second clip of the video on The Beatles official YouTube account, but nothing stating what it is actually in reference to - perhaps the upcoming Beatles "Live" project. Maybe they'll finally give the full thing a proper release then.

 

I never had a LD player that did not allow you to choose to listen to any one of the four audio channels independently.

The AC-3 was on one of the analog channels. The DTS was on the two digital channels.

The commentary was on one of the analog tracks.

 

Was the CX noise reduction worth anything on LDs?

 

Mostly for the analog audio soundtracks was this practical to use.

 

If I remember correctly, the laserdisc is sourced from a different performance than the one shown in the YouTube clip. The laserdisc has them performing in black suits while the clip - obviously also sourced from a pro-shot performance - has them in white suits.

 

Here's who had a problem.....I have a MagnaVision top-loader. It's only video output is RF into channel 3/4. I loaned it to my parents to put on a 20" TV in their guest bedroom. Their company chose an LD to watch. It was an AC-3 LD. They get a picture but just digital static for audio. The player had a stereo pair that could of been used but the TV had only an RF input. That LD was not playable in that configuration. My parents called me when this happened. I told them that their company had to choose an LD sans AC-3.

All LD players had an RF output at first. As the 80's progressed, the RF outputs gradually disappeared.

 

My Yamaha had an RF output on it, as well as an RF input. I suppose that was so you could pass your cable or TV signal through the player if you hooked it up to a TV with just an antenna or RF input. But it also had an optical digital out as well as the standard analog outputs and composite video out (it was made before S-video). I never used the RF output on it. The ProScan player doesn't have an RF output at all on it, so it's newer than the Yamaha was.

 

I've never noticed a difference, but then 90% of what I owned had a digital PCM soundtrack so there would be no need to listen to the analog. Maybe on the earlier titles it might have helped.