Had an interesting talk tonight about DVD-A's

I had an interesting dinner tonight with a good friend of mine. He's an amazing classical engineer, he's been Earl Wild's engineer for over 15 years and has won several Grammy's for classical engineering. He was in town to help Doug Sax compile 5.1 mixes of James Taylor and Ryan Adams.

Anyway, they go off on DVD-A. The Ryan Adams album is going to be released on DVD-A (it's already out on SACD) and they were just a little disgruntled at the quality of the format. It seems part of the process of authoring a DVD-A disc is to multiplex it which involves a carrier signal and depending on which system you use the results will be drastically different. I've personally heard different systems and could distinguish differences between them.

The other point they brought up is that Meridian Lossless Packing (MLP) is anything but lossless. They said that a 24/96 data stream can be data compressed in several different rates, low med, high, etc... Each, of course, sound different. SACD has only one compression rate.

Then they went into the problems with the hybrid DVD-A's. It was one of these discs with the redbook layer glued onto the flip side of the disc. Turns out the disc was too thick to fit into most car players. Then they made the redbook layer thinner but ran into problems with pit depth. They had to make the discs almost out of spec (thinner discs and shallower pits than Redbook specs allows) before they could get something that could possibly work someday.

Anyway, thought this was very interesting. It's given me something to think about.

There was also a lot of spitting, swearing and moaned about those Crest hybrid SACDs. Interesting reason behind the problems.

 

Thanks for the info. Interesting about the compression schemes being "lossy".

Now, about those reasons for Crest problems...we are all ears!

 

Financial. Seems they could make more discs out of less material if they were thinner.

Send all complaints to Bob Freedman. He's the GM of Crest. Heard some stories about him too.

 

Yeepers !

That's a surefire way of killing off a new format, cutting pennies and quality at such an early stage.

 

Something tells me Crest is hurting bigtime for this DSOTM fiasco.

 

Why shouldnt't one compress data at different rates? If it makes it easier or faster to decode? When I load a sound file from a CD into my computer, I get different results all the time, even with the same settings (in my case this is due to hardware errors).

Since I still believe (from the various papers - pros AND cons - I have read about MLP until today) that MLP is lossless indeed, to me this effect "sounds" more like some jitter-related problem or another decoding phenomenon of a related kind. If you zip a computer file, you also have various options for the compression rate without losing any of the data information; i.e. upon unzipping you get back the original data - and it will stay bit for bit accurate. Just a thought...

 

Oy Vay.

 

Mikey, for those of us not hip to Yiddish, could you elaborate?

 

LOL....sure Grant.

Oy Vay would be the same as "Oh God" , in this case expressing fustration that MLP packing isnt lossless, and that jitter problems are once again rearing their ugly head.

Sometimes I think we should go back to analog in a new format like smaller laser disks.

 

I've often thought about that too. What if CDs didn't make it back in the 80s? What would life have been like? No-wait...prerecorded cassettes were dominating things at the time...never mind...

 

I don't think Crest killed DSOTM too badly. In fact, my copy still plays just fine with no deterioration. Hey, maybe someday it will really look bad, but least we forget when PGD and WEA paid for aluminum-flake adhesive for their CDs, and "CD ROT" was born. Still alive and well on those old CDs, and not much you can do about it.

However, Crest made themselves look bad to clients. I'm sure Capitol didn't reap the benefits of a cheap manufacture. Lesson learned, cheapest can be dangerous. Their job just looks sloppy. It's a shame because one more SACD house in the US can be a good thing.....

 

Come on gort guys!

You deleted my entire post refuting all that junk--all rumor & opinion IMO--posted above about dvd-audio. And my post wasn't even written with any expletives or mean spiritedness (I don't want another AA either).

How come?

99% of the time it is the sacd-only people starting the ugly format discussions (where opinion is stated as fact), and not the dvd-audio or dvd-audio/sacd owners. Why can't we have our turn at defending our format of choice??



[T]

 

Taurus, please check your PM. You were not being mean spirited, but you really bordered "thread crapping" and we want to nip that in the butt. You may repost that edited if you see fit. We don't need poops, and that post definitely needed a napkin.

I'll also warn others, no SACD/DVD-A format war starters. Period. Keep it nice and with an open mind or we bonk it.

 

If they don't want this place to turn into another AA, they shouldn't allow posts that allow format bashing, especially when the information is essentially gossip instead of published specs. If posts are going to be pulled that offer a rebuttal, they're only adding fuel to the fire. Best to kill this at its source rather than to snip weeds that pop around it.

 

Frankly, I don't know what the deleted post said, but the first post strikes me as being somewhat anti-dvd-a. The MLP comment also seems suspect as number of professionals (such as Bob Ludwig) have stated that MLP is transparent.

 

Oy Vay again!!!

 

Yes, yes, yes....

I have both decks and a collection of media that could choke a small donkey for EACH. I think saying DVD-A sucks to another is really whale poop at this point. I think we're lucky to see Steely Dan in 5.1 with some other Warners stuff. Donald Fagan's last 2 releases were very interesting, and for me at least, inexpensive to experiment in 5.1.

SACD would personally be my favorite (not like anyone asked), but you cannot dismiss one for another. Then you are entirely missing the point. It's like saying Paris is horrible without actually going there long enough to know how it works.

Let's get back on track. Or.....

 

Does getting back on track mean we need to spread more rumors about the shortcomings of DVD-A? That was the spirit of the original post. Wait, let me read it again just to be sure. Yep, that seemed to be it, with a comment on the Crest issue thrown in for "balance".

 

Yesman was merely reporting what he heard. He did not get overly opinionated. Like he said, it was something to think about.

And I think when you try another digital format, there *are* some things you need to think about. And I'm not saying one IS better. It's just preference for the most part.

Please, do NOT make me close this bugger.

 

Here's the tightened up version of my original post............

This is a serious accusation.

I have NEVER heard of this.

This is called "research and development". A totally standard thing when developing any new product. Read more about these discs here. And Warner's future flipper disc site: DualDisc.com

And while we're at it, I’ll clear up some dvd-audio misconceptions still being constantly spread:

1) Dvd-audio does not--repeat does NOT--require watermarking. It is an OPTION. And the only time I've read where someone could actually hear it is when the watermarking encoder was used at its highest "power". Anything lower resulted in negative results.

2) Dvd-audio discs do NOT have to be made with menus. The Elv1s disc from BMG and a new classical release from MDG are proof of this.

3) A video portion is NOT required on a dvd-audio disc. Video is one of the most difficult & time consuming parts to deal with on a dvd-audio disc, but only if you want it there in the first place.

[T]

 

The thread should be closed. That is the proper way to deal with this. Of course, that's just my opinion. Carry on!

 

I'd think one of the biggest drawbacks any high resolution system has is bass management. I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it yet.

If you use the .1 channel, you risk getting too much / too little bass.

If you don't use it, and don't own something like an ICBM, you can't do proper bass management. If you do so at the receiver level, SACD or DVD-A must be converted back to digital and then to analogue. So any high resolution benefit is lost.

For me, that's the biggest shortcoming both formats have... well, that one and lack of software!

 

Vex, it's fine. In fact, Taurus is correct about his 1, 2 and 3. His proposed post hinged upon heated opinion. I'm glad he totally fixed things for the better....

I agree with .1 management for both formats. Too little .1 activity is my experience... That's hard to do right sometimes!

 

Bass management requires DSP of the audio signal, which corrupts the ingegrity of the original soundstream (be it DSD or hi-rez PCM). The best bass management is NO bass managment, or more proplery defined, bass management is best accomplished through proper speaker choice and placement.

 

I was just posting what happens with MLP during the creation of a disc and I thought hearing the opinion of another, well respected mastering engineer was important enough to post here. His comments were very strongly based on what he's heard through his experiences.

I was wanting to bring more of a technical description of things (coming from two great mastering engineers) instead of another opinion thread. I'm happy we have DVD-A. There's a couple of discs I'm grateful for having... but then again that goes for CDs, vinyl and even cassettes.

Gorts, feel free to delete this thread if things start to get out of hand. I just thought this would be of interest to some people. I never thought it would spice people up so much. I'm sorry.