Video Asylum TVs, VCRs, DVD players, Home Theater systems and more.

---

[ Follow Ups ] [ Post Followup ] Thread: [ Display  All  Email ] [ Video Asylum ]

---

[ Alert Moderator ]

---

Stereo & surround…

Posted by David Aiken (A) on May 29, 2008 at 18:02:47

In Reply to: "...and not make even a passing comment on sound quality?" Waal... posted by clarkjohnsen on May 29, 2008 at 09:15:55:

OK, now I understand the ommission.

As someone who started out watching movies in simple stereo and has progressed in stages to 6.1, I'm happy to share some of my thoughts on surround vs stereo plus how I felt I got the best stereo results. YMMV.

Basically I've come to the conclusion that you get the best results when you reproduce the soundtrack with exactly the same number of channels as the soundtrack possesses. It's common to hear people complaining about how expanding stereo to 5.1 doesn't sound all that brilliant, but I've come to the conclusion that collapsing 5.1 to stereo also introduces problems. Mixing channels together seems to reduce the clarity of things to my ears, just as fake surround often sounds, well, fake.

If you are going to go for stereo, however, my best results with stereo—prior to my surround days—came when I selected a dedicated stereo sound track when the disc offered that, and when I avoided the 2 channel pseudo-surround options offered by my player and receiver. In other words, best results for stereo came from stereo sound tracks (see point above) which were then left unaltered with fancy processing. The only time I really felt happy with pseudo surround effects were on those rare soundtracks like on the 4 disc Lord of the Rings movie sets where the 2 channel mix on the disc included the pseudo surround effects, ie the 2 channel soundtrack had specifically been mixed to provide those effects.

Few BD discs seem to have dedicated stereo soundtracks and I haven't tried downmixing a BD surround track to stereo. If you're not using HDMI you probably don't have much choice other than letting the PS3 do the downmix. In the absence of experimentation I'd downmix the highest quality soundtrack on the disc if you have a choice of soundtracks. I'd go for downmixing an uncompressed PCM soundtrack first before choosing a Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD MA soundtrack. I somehow doubt you'll find a choice between Dolby True HD and DTS HD MA on any disc since the standard practice seems to be to offer one or the other but not both but, in the unlikely event that both were offered I'd probably tend to pick the DTS HD MA track over the Dolby True HD track since I tend to think that DTS sounds better than Dolby, at least for the old formats. I don't have any discs which let me do an A/B comparison on the same soundtrack.

I wouldn't choose to downmix an older Dolby or DTS soundtrack over a high def version of the same soundtrack but it might be worth actually comparing an older Dolby/DTS dedicated 2 channel soundtrack to a downmixed new Dolby/DTS soundtrack. I'm not certain whether a proper stereo soundtrack in a lossy compression format would win out over a downmixed lossless surround soundtrack.



David Aiken

This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors:

Signature Sound

[ Signature Sound Lounge ]

---

[ Top of Page ] [ Contact Us ] [ Support/Wish List ] [ Copyright © 2024, Audio Asylum, all rights reserved ]

---

[ General ] [ Speakers ] [ Tubes ] [ Vinyl ] [ Digital ] [ Hi-Rez ] [ Video Asylum ] [ Cables ] [ Tweaks/DIY ] [ Music ] [ Films ]

---