In %99.99 (perhaps %100) of all cases the same master is used on both digital and analog tracks of an LD. With that being assumed then the difference (on the disc) is that the digital has a higher SNR and less distortion. Player hardware matters greatly however one assumes if your analog stage is exceptional then so is your digital stage.

Verdict: people like distortion.

Yep, we wouldn't have any modern guitar players without it, I doubt very strongly that anybody would want to listen to any
rock song from the 70s to now without it.

Yeah would love to see or hear that one.
This sounds like a user error and you should never have that audio issue.
Disc that comes to mind where you can hear the projector is the Japanese release of Friday the 13th, I remember it was cool at the time
but thought it was garbage and sold it off.

Ok, here are the files, PW is my username:
https://www.mediafire.com/file/b54focwd ... c.rar/file

Both files contain the audio from when the disc starts spinning and the very beginning of the film, then jumps to the end of the film and when the disc stops spinning.
edit: The X9 file might only have the beginning part, I forget.

You can clearly hear the disc spinning in the beginning part since it's spinning faster.

Since someone posted the pics of a Japanese Pioneer LD-S1 audio board, here is a CX-decoding chip in the flesh.



It's the HITACHI HA12043 mentioned on Wikipedia and an archived HITACHI PDF: https://archive.org/details/Hitachi-QuickReferenceGuidetoIntegratedCircuitsAndDiscreteSemiconductorDevices1984OCR/page/n46/mode/1up?view=theater providing the NR improvement: 14dB.

This is the CX-14 version compatible with LDs.

Julien

BTW, LD digital audio is *literally* CD audio at the encoding level. Aside from LD-G that's a distinction without a difference really.

For most of the LDs I have, CX NR is usually set to ON, but for some other ones, like Evil Dead, The (1981) [SF078-5044], it sets to OFF.

What determines this?

The disc TOC (table of contents) will tell the player if CX should (stereo) or shouldn't (mono or mixed channels) be turned on.

Julien

I'll just add a couple thins from my experience and some that are anecdotal so take them for what they're worth.

As far as manually turning CX off. In my experience from a couple Pioneer players I've owned including a CLD-D503, you have "old" discs pre-1985 mostly that are Analog only and then you have discs that have Digital and Analog soundtracks. So the D/A button on the remote will turn CX on and off only on the old Analog only. Discs. If the discs has Digital and Analog it just switch between Analog and Digital. If you have an old Analog only disc give it a try it's fun to hear what CX actually does. Definitely takes away a lot of noise.

As far as Analog being "better" than Digital, yeah obviously not spec wise. Digital/CD 'can be' amazing! But look at Duran Duran was PA-83-044, Analog only. The audio on that disc is from the 1/2" master that used a DBX 150 I believe which basically doubled the dynamic range to a total of 115db something that digital systems were just starting to be able to do. According to the person on LDDB he also agrees the CD was inferior. (Later CD re-releases were improved of course) But it is possible the Analog tracks could have a better transfer than what is on digital.

Same with some of the Police/Sting discs I have. Some of the analog tracks for me sound amazing. I know Digital/CD was notorious for a time for having bad digital transfers that compressed everything from the original master recordings. Not that much of an expert the analog tracks on some of the videos you can hear more of the high notes of the guitar and high hats. At least seems like it when I've played around switching back and forth. Again, that doesn't mean I believe Analog is better, no I firmly believe Digital/CD is basically overkill almost for what my ears. But it comes down to the who, how or where the transfer came from. For movies I would guess Analog is a downgrade most times, but for older movies where the original soundtrack was analog? I don't know. Again, depends if they over compressed the digital version and maybe just dumped the original analog. Maybe the more untouched analog could sound better in some ways? I'm sure they're are people that know a lot about sound tracks and things, which I don't but I do find interesting.

True for the most part but not entirely. I'm not sure when the CX flag was embedded regularly on LD software to control when CX is activated or not but of the titles I have owned with no flag they were both from 1982. These are the two.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) [LV 1180]
Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, The (1977) [25 AS]

And of these two discs, they were also the only discs I owned where only "minutes" were embedded on the run time so if I searched to a specific point on the disc the player limited me to full minutes in time.

It should also be noted that some disc producers continued to press discs w/ no digital sound up to at least 1989 based on one title I own that came out in that time period (and it was set-up w/ the auto CX flag).




Not sure I would call that noise it's taking away as if we're comparing it to tape hiss and Dolby B noise reduction for tape. CX was developed to improve the sound of analog audio but actually used to also fix an issue w/ interference w/ the video signal. This article better explains it than myself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CX_(noise_reduction)

scroll down to the section called "Use on LaserDisc and CED VideoDisc".





Honestly speaking, of the few times that I have switched between Analog and Digital, I could barely hear a difference between the two tracks especially if they were sourced from the same master. I assume the Digital track would always be better and it can actually improve depending on what D/A Converter set-up you are using (if using the S/PDIF outputs). Also, I do find that players built between 1988 and 1990 that use multi-bit DAC's have great digital sound.




I have no real opinion about this since I haven't done an A/B tests on any level. However, I can agree that in the early days of PCM (especially CD), record producers were still trying to figure out how to master analog to digital and some early releases were just bad (Whitney Houston's debut album was one of them as it was recorded really low for some odd reason).

It's worth noting that the original poster is in Sweden, ie PAL-land.

CX encoding was something of a rarity on PAL discs. The earliest players - Philips VLP-600 & 700 - didn't have CX decoding, so most early discs weren't CX encoded. These players probably made up the bulk of the installed player base until CD-Video came along (although I have no figures to back that up).

All Pioneer players from the start (LD-1100 onwards) had CX decoding - and so most/all Pioneer-label PAL disc releases had CX encoding, but that was only a small slice of the market.

Although I'm not sure that the LD-1100 recognised the auto-switching code, but I'm fairly sure the subsequent LD-700 did.

And also not sure whether the very earliest PAL CX discs had that switching code, hence the need for a button!

So PAL remained mostly-CX-less, and of course when digital sound came along that was the end of PAL analogue sound, CX or not!