DVD Audio

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I'm starting to see DVD audio released mixed among the other titles at some record shops, but for the most part they seem to be yuppie poop like The Doors and Natalie Merchant and Fleetwood Mac (okay, not so poopy, but still very much targeted at the yuppie). Today I picked up a Morton Subotnick release which featured both DVD audio and DVD video, as well as some stuff for the PC...it has four-channel sound, which is one of the promises of DVD audio. My question, though: are there any other half-challenging DVD audio releases out there? Have any of you been buying and experiencing them? Is it worth the extra scratch?

― Sean Carruthers, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Zaireeka is going to be released on dvd, I am interested in hearing it.

― Jeff, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

So you're saying I shouldn't have bought those three extra stereos?

― Nitsuh, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

i want the dvd of all the beastie boys videos and like 150 remixes. but i don't have a dvd player.

all-time dream dvd: the de la soul collection. all videos, all remixes, b-sides, rarities. drool.

― ethan, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I've got that Beasties DVD, ethan...definitely another good use of the DVD technology...multiple audio streams, multiple "camera angles" (again, just different streams). You can sit there and make your own mixes on the fly just by adjusting your menu settings. Almost justifies the purchase of a DVD player all by itself.

That said, that's not precisely what I meant by DVD audio: the new releases I mean are just reissues of single albums, like Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, in higher definition and only on DVD format. Originally when the DVD format was introduced, they were talking about single DVD compilations of an artist's entire back catalogue, and I still think that would be a good thing...but it seems they're trying to soak us yet again.

Flaming Lips' Zaireeka: I am there.

― Sean Carruthers, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Trying to soak us yet again is exactly it.

It wasn't good enough to *force* everyone to adopt the CD format, now we have SACD, DVD audio, who knows what else... it makes me sick. It's all profit-taking from greedy electronics manufacturers, and record companies trying to sell their back-catalogs over and over. Come to think of it, the electronics and record companies are one and the same these days, hmmm, reeks of monopoly to me, but what do I know. If they had gotten the CD right in the first place, instead of rushing it to market with 16-bit sound, this would probably be less of an issue.

It's a whole 'nother issue, and am not looking forward to being slammed by people who disagree (without really knowing what they're talking about), but I'm one of those folks who think LPs sound the best anyway... tho I'm spinning them on a decked out Linn LP-12...

Destroy: DVD-Audio and SACD

― Sean, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yeah, CDs were slammed on people because of the higher profit margin... I am not sure that 16 bits is the issue, as recent re-issues demonstrate, the problem lied with the mastering process early on... while I still enjoy LPs, and have always loved the sound from an acetate, the erratic manufacturing of LPs (part of the conspiracy, I suppose) and the high cost of a playback rig shure did not keep people on the LP fold, aside from the portability factor.

The current format wars between SACD and DVD-A suck the big one, but there you go... hopefully, it is settled soon, though I never understand the need, except for bigger storage capacity and the multi-channel capability... the former being good for box sets rather than people going crazy with 50+ minute albums.

― fernando, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Before we get too far down the LP vs. digital road, just a polite request to avoid turning this into another analogue v. digital holy war. I think we've done that before.

― Sean Carruthers, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

My issue isn't the digitality, it's just that two seems like the magic number for speaker channels. We have two ears, you know. Once you go beyond that, where's the stopping point? Five years from now, will everything suddenly be reissued on six channels? By the time I die, will you need 360 tiny speakers in a circular array just to listen to old folk albums? Will you begin to look like an old codger because you're satisfied with a well-placed left and right arrangement?

Obviously I can see how additional channels can be interesting -- I dug Zaireeka, and I'd kill to listen to what Cornelius could do with a room full of outputs. But music, thanks mainly to the industry itself, tends toward standards, and two-channel stereo seems like the ideal standard for contemporary music. I hate to say that people shouldn't go beyond that, if they want to, but at some point it begins to disconnect music from the bulk of people, many of whom are lucky to afford a portable boombox.

So I'm saying: cool idea, but please don't let anyone push this as an actual standard. Please.

― Nitsuh, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

While I understand that signal processing can give you pretty good positional audio from just one set of speakers, I think it's certainly a lot easier to do with four...which is why the four- speaker plus subwoofer set seems to have become the defacto standard for home theatre or PC gaming lately.

When I was working on pieces in my electroacoustic class back in 19 ought six (okay, 1989 or so), one of my ideas was to wire the whole auditorium with hidden speakers placed throughout the crowd, and play it back from the eight or sixteen-track mixboard, all raw audio out, and then create a swirling effect that washed through the room. Because this wasn't feasible--for a number of reasons--I simply chose to overwhelm the crowd with three channels from the front of the room (left, right, and centre) coming out of two loudspeakers at full volume. It worked okay, but I still wonder if it would have been more effective with two rear channels. (If anyone is interested in hearing the piece, I might be able to MP3 it.)

I haven't heard the Subotnick piece I mentioned in the header question yet...just got it on my lunchbreak today. Will advise when I finally get to hear it in quad audio. And that brings up a point: didn't someone already try to make quad sound a standard once upon an age?

― Sean Carruthers, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yes, in the 70's there was a push for quad, and there were two competing standards (SQ, and I forget what the other one was called). The idea flopped back then, and I don't see many people clammoring for it now, BUT it is true that many more people have 4- channel setups in their homes now because of the popularity of home theater, so it more feasible now. Note that I didn't say more desirable.

― Sean, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Yes, surely it's the home-theater setups that make such a concept palatable to people. But I suppose what disturbs me is that moving toward such as thing as a musical standard puts a whole lot of equipment between the music and the listener. If we imagine artists putting together records that are designed for four-channel listening -- and therefore probably best appreciated on four channels -- suddenly you have to sit in your living room with an expensive sound system just to listen to the thing. Which I suppose is fine now and then, but geez. I guess I don't like to imagine too much music being released that would require over, say, $60* of equipment to listen to.

* The CD format probably goes cheaper than this, right? I'm thinking you can buy a little boombox stereo or a low-end discman and headphones for about that much.

― Nitsuh, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Nitsuh, I certainly sympathize with what you have to say, given that there have been times in my life when I had nothing more than a boombox, if that, to blast my music. I don't like the idea of musicians forcing us to have to buy new equipment to fully "appreciate" their output, but then there are those artists who might want to do so not for money, but possibly for love or even art. Others already have--and I wish I had the means to hear the works as they were intended.

I'm thinking of Varese's "Symphonic Poem," which dates back almost fifty years and utilized multiple channels and speakers-- twelve, if I remember correctly. Every electronic musician from then on seemed to realize his or her compositions with four or more channels, so even all these decades on few of us have heard the "whole story." I don't have a DVD player yet, though someday I'll know I'll want one--but I'll only buy an audio DVD if it truly gives one something extra that's worth the extra cash.

― X. Y. Zedd, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I agree with your sentiments of people making albums that have to be listened at home... right now, when an album is mixed, they do make an attempt to make it sound good through what people actually use... although bands like Steely Dan make audiophiles drool. So, if they do mixes of albums for 4+ channels, then it better also sound good in a normal stereo/boombox... and as usually, the information on the additional channels exists in the main channels (just mixed at a different level or some sounds missing), there could be little risk of that situation.

That said, I can imagine that you could listen to it in a boombox, but still look forward to listening to it at home, just like it happens now with the stuff that we buy (for some).

In regards to LP vs. CD... yeah, that is a thread that I would not participate in... since it has been going on in Usenet since I joined it in '93... and it is mostly preferences being leveraged as fact, or facts being leveraged as the only way to listen... just ridiculous.

― fernando, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

the only four channel dvd audio of steely dan i want to hear is, as stated above, de la's 'eye know'.

― ethan, Friday, 20 July 2001 00:00 (twenty-four years ago)

one year passes...

Anyone know how far out the DVD-A industry is from the once touted 18 hour capacity (24-bit audio)?

― christoff (christoff), Thursday, 9 January 2003 15:44 (twenty-three years ago)

It's already possible. A single sided, single layer DVD ("DVD-5") is 4.7 GB, a double layer one ("DVD-9") is 8.5 GB. There's double sided variants of these (DVD-10 and DVD-18) which double these capacities.

24 bit/48 kHz audio: (24 bit x 96000 Hz x 2 channels / 8 bits per byte) x 60 minutes x 60 seconds = 0.97 GB/hour

A DVD-18 can hold 17.08 GB, so that means 17h 36m capacity - there's the 18 hour capacity they touted.

Can't think of any release that actually uses this, though. One explanation is that double sided DVD are very expensive to produce, so it's more economical to use two single sided discs.

― Siegbran (eofor), Thursday, 9 January 2003 16:13 (twenty-three years ago)

Shit, read 48000 for 96000 there.

― Siegbran (eofor), Thursday, 9 January 2003 16:18 (twenty-three years ago)

Thanks for the details, Siegbran -- and thanks for catching that glarring mistake. Does one need special equipment (dual frequency laser?) to read the dual density discs? --Even at 9 hours, though.... What fun.

Lots of Macs have DVD-RW drives, anybody loaded-up one of those yet?

― christoff (christoff), Thursday, 9 January 2003 16:20 (twenty-three years ago)

Presumably 4.7GB (or is it 4.7G - i.e. 4.7 billion bytes - some confusion over DVD manufacturers disregarding the nomenclature) equals the data capacity of a DVD-5, so, writing audio on there (with the lesser degree of error correction) would presumably afford an even greater capacity. In the same way that you can fit 74min of audio on a 650MB CD-R, even though 74min of 16/44.1k stereo = 757MB. Unless you just can't do this with DVDs (different physical organisation).

Practically all DVD players handle dual-layer discs, don't they? Any DVD-video release with more than a couple of hours of stuff has to use a DVD-9 after all.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Thursday, 9 January 2003 16:30 (twenty-three years ago)

The data CD vs audio CD capacity thing re: error correction doesn't apply to DVD fortunately, the stated capacity is for audio and data alike. The capacity is 4.7 "real" GB's, and 5.0 billion bytes (hence the names DVD-5, -9, -10 and -18 which refer to how many billion bytes they can hold).

And yes, virtually all DVD films are released on dual-layer DVD-9 discs, so every player can read them. DVD-RW discs are single layer, single sided (4.7 GB), so on these discs you can only store about 4 and a half hours worth. Or, if you use CD source material (16 bit/44.1 kHz), 8 hours.

― Siegbran (eofor), Thursday, 9 January 2003 17:18 (twenty-three years ago)

(hence the names DVD-5, -9, -10 and -18 which refer to how many billion bytes they can hold)

Well, bugger me, I didn't know that. I thought it was some reference to physical size (like CD-3, CD-5, etc), but, er, that completely breaks down beyond DVD-5 clearly.

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Thursday, 9 January 2003 17:35 (twenty-three years ago)

Thought I'd revive this thread as I'm wondering about getting the Mode DVD release of Morton Feldman's String Quartet no.2. I realise this isn't a DVD-audio disc, but an audio-only DVD-video disc.

Thing is, it's apparently 367 minutes long, and 24/48k stereo - if my sums are right, that 5.91GB. Surely a dual-layer disc is (just) needed and that's going to mean a pause in proceedings on most players. Can anyone who's seen this disc (web searches haven't yielded more than the above tech info) confirm whether it's a DVD-5 or DVD-9?

(To be honest, I don't think my Sony *does* pause at layer transition, but I thought I'd check...)

― Michael Jones (MichaelJ), Tuesday, 21 January 2003 13:33 (twenty-three years ago)

one month passes...

Okay, another revive here (sorry Michael, didn't know anything about the Feldman). I've been doing some testing of DVD Audio with 5.1 audio reproduction, and there's something that's not sitting quite right with me here: the higher-frequency sounds sound so sharp and piercing to me now that it almost hurts my head. I'm trying to figure out whether that's just because I'm so used to the lower-resolution sound on CDs or the rumble from turntables that this high-definition is coming as a shock to me, or whether there's actually something wrong with the way this is being decoded on this particular equipment. (I'm using a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 Platinum card, which has amazing sound otherwise, with movie reproduction. It's got 106dBA signal-to-noise as well.)

I'm tempted to think it's me, but I'm interested in feedback from anyone else who's already listened to a lot of DVD Audio, either at home or in the stereo store.

― Sean Carruthers (SeanC), Monday, 3 March 2003 22:02 (twenty-three years ago)

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