Video Asylum

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you're fu... um, screwed

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr on November 27, 2008 at 14:24:55:
The only valid use of Dialog Normalization is for television (think taming of loud TV commercials). Now the sad part...

When Dolby Digital first came out, a few CE manufacturers allowed for the adjustment of Dialog Normalization in their receivers. Dolby was a bit pissed, as they didn't want this to be available. When they rewrote their licensing rules, they specifically put in the agreement that any feature which allowed for the adjustment/turning OFF of Dialog Normalization would be prohibited. In other words, FUCK everybody -- you're going to accept this shitty "feature" if you want to license our codec.

This wouldn't be a problem if their encoder was set to -31dB (essentially OFF): the downfall is that its default setting is -27dB (ie, ON). Unless the audio engineer adjusts Dialog Normalization to OFF/-31dB, you will get the unwelcomed virus. For the record, Dialog Normalization is actually encoded in the metadata, not the actual digital audio. I've seen some people explain that it's just recording the audio "x" dB lower: that's incorrect, as the audio is intact, but the metadata forces it to be adjusted. By design, every current product which decodes a Dolby codec (Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, etc.) must apply whatever coefficients are contained in the metadata (ie, there's no defeating it if it's there).

Dolby claims their TrueHD codec is lossless: that's only true (oh, the irony of the codec's name) if Dialog Normalization is set to OFF/-31dB. The reality is that if there is Dialog Normalization encoded in the metadata stream of a Dolby TrueHD soundtrack, the output is no longer lossless. Dialog Normalization is basically digital volume control.

DTS also offers Dialog Normalization in their products. However, it is defaulted to OFF/-31dB. An audio engineer would have to deliberately make the decision to change the setting. As was the case with DVD, DTS has always been about quality re: audio.