I was hoping to watch a 1080p version of So Close on Prime Video tonight. It's here if you want to see it yourself: https://www.amazon.co.uk/So-Close-Qi-Shu/dp/B01CZ6SSR8

I knocked it off after about 5 minutes because the DD5.1 track used on this new 1080p streaming-only version is FECKING AWFUL!!!

I swear to God, the audio is so weak it sounds like a British Telecom engineer the size of an ant with a voice that sounds like a plate of beans negotiating their way out of a cow's digestive system!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I ended up scolding the chat rep in to full submission and issuing me a refund. How can a DD5.1 track sound so UTTERLY like weeping anus smegma? Gordon Bennett!!

After I'd ventured outside to collect my television and assorted audio visual equipment and repaired the window, I decided to make a cup of tea and settle down with my Japanese DTS Superbit DVD of So Close instead. Whilst gripping the armchair so hard by the end credits I'd left a permanent grip mark in it as the last dying embers of rage exited my being.

The Superbit DTS DVD is superb. I chuckled at every poor gag, I ducked and dived as every spent revolver bullet sonically sped over my shoulders, I winced at the sound of stilettos burying themselves in concrete walls. It was a tremendous experience.

So the question begs, do we really need to mess with soundtracks when the one's that were already there are usually perfectly fine? And another thing, and excuse ignorance here, but is DTS considered better than DD5.1? I have no idea so am curious to know.

I'm off to go yell at a bunch of teenagers, then I'm going back to my shed in the garden to engrave something, or turn some wood on a lathe...

Hi teddanson,

can I respectfully ask if you feel so aggrieved at anything else in the same way PLEASE post it on here.

I don't think I have enjoyed a rant with such relish for a long time.

Thanks & that was a good one to say the least .

Is it one of the "DD+ 5.1 optimized for streaming" soundtracks with a very low bandwidth?

Julien

I’ve never listened to anything streaming in multi-channel before. I have little confidence the bit rate will be sufficient when it clearly isn’t for the visuals and people prioritize visuals much more than audio so the guy in charge will throw most of the bandwidth at visuals.

If it’s as bad as you say it sounds like a screwup of some kind though.

And no Dolby Digital and DTS don’t sound so much different that one is total crap and the other is amazing. That’s not part of the issue at all.

A DTS superbit DVD will have decent quality audio for that type of media, any equivalent DD5.1 DVD won't sound as good. So yes DTS is better than DD5.1. Usually the bitrate will be higher anyway but even if it's around the same DTS will sound better.

The difference usually isn't massive though, as signofzeta pointed out it isn't a case of total crap versus amazing.


In the case of this streamed version I can only guess the audio bitrate was reduced too much from a high bitrate source and not actually tested. I've seen (or should I say heard) this plenty of times over the years with pirate rips, it simply boils down to ineptitude and laziness.

DD+ 5.1 is a catchy keywords but I've seen videos files where I ended up listening to the 2ch (stereo) track, it sounded better than the 32Kbps DD+ 5.1 one.

Is any streaming offering lossless 5.1 codecs?

It's always my least favorite marketing buzzword being thrown around: "up to <whatever>".
DD+ it "up to 640Kbps" but rarely is.
Price discount is "up to 50%" but only really one item is.

When ever I see a "up to" click and bait now, I pass.

Julien

No. All major services are using AAC or DD+. You can have a look at the specs here.
https://www.flatpanelshd.com/flatforums ... hp?p=27322

How do you think a streaming service will be giving you the same or similar audio than what you already own?

Damn, how it is to be young and have first world problems again.
When will America be like this again so I can p**s out the window when my CD skipps.

Worse. Someone walked up to a computer with, I dunno let's say Pro Tools on it.

Logged in.

Opened the audio file.

Had some bizarre fit and clicked everything in sight for about 5 minutes.

Thought to themselves "Yes, that'll do".

Clicked render file.

Sent it off to whoever is in charge of their stuff.

Drove home in their 1974 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser.

Stopped off at Wendy's for a Baconator.

Arrived home and drove their car in to their swimming pool, set fire to the cat and burned their house down.

It's that bad.

So Teddanson, you have the superbit DVD sitting in your home and then you choose stream it, are dissatisified so watch the DVD? I don't get it. Why don't you just watch the DVD in the first place? Because the DVD isn't 1080?

While your hyperbole is adequate I don’t see many terms here that people normally use to identify audio issues so even if we experience the same issue we’ll never be able to compare experiences.

I wanted to check out the 1080p version as it isn't available in HD any other way, which is odd in itself.

I ran in to a similar problem yesterday with The Last American Hero. The PAL LD has an awesome analog track. The opening sequence alone is deafening!

I then tried out the new HD version young Jeffrey kindly encoded and shoved on Amazon for a small rental fee. This one has a DD+ track and this one too suffers from So Close Syndrome.

The audio is much quieter and just seems muddled, as if there is no real sound separation at all, just a muffled, muddled mess in the middle.

As an aside the print used has a slightly different intro to the LD. A 20th Century Fox cinema ident and an extra title at the start. The LD has a CBS FOX ident and misses the first opening credit.

Jeffrey's version looks like a scan from a theatre reel. No idea what the LD is from?

That is the general problem with many streaming platforms. The audio simply isn't that great even though Netflix has improved over the past
twelve months in my view. Even a DVD sometimes sounds better.
I don't know. Video wise we have made so much progress over the past three decades but audio wise it is the other way around. Sure
there are great sounding Blu Rays and even some DVDs that sound good but a lot of the stuff that can be streamed and downloaded sounds terrible.
Same goes to many audio releases nowadays. A lot of the records that I have from the 80s simply sound perfect! I listened to the Top
Gun soundtrack on vinyl yesterday and I was blown away.
There are a lot of films in HD resolution that can only be purchased via Amazon, iTunes, etc. and they have crappy sound. In this case the best thing
would be to extract the audio from the laserdisc and mux it with the video in HD resolution from your video download but that is not easy easy procedure.

I just think that people back in the day really cared about sound, about producing a great sounding vinyl record, laserdisc, etc.

Have to say I totally agree with your posting confederate, more specifically for me the rot truly started to set in with the advent of the wonderful DVD format. As you mention above some do manage to sound pretty decent heard in isolation but if you are in a position to do a back to back comparison with the same material on LD the DVD usually falls down every time, on the other hand BD has at least taken things a good step forward regarding serious Home Cinema performance more so in terms of image quality though as I feel LD at its very best still has an overall edge on audio quality. I realise just going on paper specs alone Bluray audio surpasses Laserdisc, but judged subjectively I find it's often a different story.

Yes, I know several films that sound superb on Laserdisc even compared to the DTS-HA Master 5.1 track that can be often heard on a BluRay.

One such example is The Bounty with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. The laserdisc track has crazy dynamics and sounds excellent. The Blu Ray most definitely sounds good
but I just find the laserdisc's PCM 2.0 track sounds like it is truer to the source if you know what I mean. There is not a single DVD that sounds remotely as good as the same film
on laserdisc. Therefore I often prefer laserdisc to DVD.
Of course the Blu Ray of the Bounty looks a million times better than the laserdisc ( in fact the Blu Ray looks excellent ) so the best way would be to mux the two. Then I would
be truly happy.

It just sounds like you guys like stuff compressed. There’s nothing wrong with that and stuff that is made for it sounds better on it (Top Gun OST on LP, I have no doubt that’s a perfect match) but when it comes to super surround stuff at high volume levels CD/LD simply isn’t even close to modern digital sound schemes. You can’t make things quiet after a certain point and the highs get murked completely.

When older movies/albums are remastered into a space with massively more dynamic range it’s a difficult thing to pull off. If you match peak volume levels the noise will be unreal. If you expand the range then certain things will drop out or become overly bright. It’s not completely a square peg/round hole situation but it sort of is...you could just transfer it to the new format with zero changes but that’s going to mean you have to turn your system way up and if it’s a POS sound bar that’s going to sound terrible.

This is the sort of thing that people have a hard time verbalizing. In fact often the people who are most concerned about it are least literate when it comes to audio technology. People who understand audio at a more advanced level have the technical understanding but they are typically ideologically predisposed to believe everything new is better and an improvement on the old ways every time so they don’t really ponder the question. If you’ve done a lot of recording though...EQ, compression, expansion, it’s something you’ll reflexively understand.

Current gen digital surround has a SNR that is...what, 120bd or more? What in the real world generates sound that dynamic? A moon rocket? A top fuel dragster? Maybe. Certainly not a human voice, a guitar, a classic drum machine, swords clashing, or a punch to the face. In fact no mic has a that dynamic range, I’m pretty sure. The purpose of the extra range is so that the theater sound system can better represent the dynamic range of all of reality and then the sound designer plugs those elements into the matrix in the right places. For a human child whispering to be heard over Megatron’s head being ripped off in the middle of a hurricane you need massive range and frequency response that CD can’t pull off and nothing analog that’s even remotely affordable or practical could do it at all.

People are famous for saying that New Order’s original Factory 12” of Blue Monday pumps as hard as any dance record and I agree. If you’re super into wax to the point where you can tell what country something was pressed in just by looking at the grooves you can pretty much tell just by examining the way it’s cut by eye that this is a banger. At 45 RPM there is enough space to make the signal as loud as possible and the staccato nature of the sound makes it so that the drum hits are left alone preserving the pump of the DMX. It’s exactly 10lbs of sausage in a sack made for exactly 10lbs of sausage and even the CD versions won’t do it the same way.

Watching All in the Family on Bluray would be the opposite, a golf pencil in a mine shaft. Something like Top Gun would be half way between. Much more rockin but still there is nothing in the movie 120 louder than anything else so you have to f with it and at the same time make it 7.2 compatible and after all that is never going to be the same no matter how good of a job somebody does.

Like laserfanhld-gb and Confederate posts in this thread. I ran out of thumbs ups I guess..?

It all comes down to that streaming is a "convenience."

Like with digital audio downloads (also a convenience), such things are not out there for performance and quality.

For people who just want to hear the music or just see a movie digital streaming is "good enough."

And it's made to be just "good enough."

If you want quality, that costs more and isn't convenient (like having to buy a blu-ray for a movie or a CD or vinyl for music.)

Many friends of mine don't have a home theater setup or even a setup for quality music. All their entertainment is Netflix, Amazon Prime, etc on their smart TV and cable box with just the audio coming from their TV speakers. Music is from their phones with a dinky bluetooth speaker.

It's unfortunately the way of the world these days.

Convenience over quality.

That’s always the way it’s been. When LD was king most people in the US were watching TV over rabbit ears and copying their favorite shows onto the cheapest VHS tapes with an Emerson mono VCR. I don’t know why anyone would expect Blu-ray to be the most popular way to see something when 9/10 its shackled to your biggest TV and people can watch 1080p Hulu on their phones. I wanted Macbook/iMac with built in BR drive but they never made it so I have to stream on my computers. Phones are too small to ever have a 5” drive, etc. So if you have three people in the same family each watching their own things on phones in different rooms Blu-ray has zero chance of getting a similar sized audience. Also I could be half way through an episode of What We Do In the Shadows before a BR even starts playing.

With Americans working more and more hours people have started watching TV only at work on breaks, I’d assume at least 10,000,000 hours of Netflix have already been watched from toilet seats since the start of 2020.