After 30 odd years of wanting to own a laser disc player I’ve finally purchased a pioneer 2950, but have some questions.

1/ What is AC3 and can my machine play it?
2/ I’m running the player from composite to my pioneer amp but I appear to get slight noise when the image is moving quickly. Is this normal?
3/ My tv is a LGC8, would I be better off getting a scarf to hdmi coverter and bypassing the amp completely?
4/ I’ve noticed voices are very quiet in stereo surround (my amp is normally on 42 and I have to go to around 25) is this normal?
5/ Will my player play DTS disks? I want to buy Jurassic Park with DTS.
6/ I watched True Lies and the info page shows 3 dots on the front and a dot on back for surround which I am guessing is left centre, right and a read speaker. I’m sure I was only getting stereo with the digital lead. Do I need to set something specific on my amp.
All my Dolby surround sound like standard stereo.
Apologies for all the questions.

Number ONE question is AC-3.

Serious question, are you a duplicate troll account of an LDDB member?

There are a lot of questions here.
Search will be your friend on a lot of them and lots of research.

DTS and AC3 have been asked very recently here on the forum thus questions from zeta or resident troll hunter.
I don't use either and haven't for the past 12 or so years but I think DTS you can get from any player with digital toslink but your amp is the question
if it supports this.

AC3 needs a special decoder/demodulator and you can luck out by getting an integrated amp with AC3 built in but your player will need an AC3 out on the back.
If you don't see it you ain't got it.

The CLD-2950 doesn't have an AC-3 output, so you won't be able to listen to AC-3 tracks with your player. Fortunately, all the disks that have AC-3 tracks also have regular digital tracks that will work with any of the audio output options on your player. (To your question about what AC-3 is, it's an old name for Dolby Digital. So discrete surround channels but compressed audio.)

In case you're confused about Dolby Surround, it means 4-channel surround sound down-matrixed into stereo audio tracks. The receiver does some math (phase addition and subtraction or somesuch) on the stereo audio to extrapolate which sounds were intended for the center and rear speakers prior to down-matrixing. So as long as your receiver is in a mode like "Dolby Surround" or "Dolby Pro-Logic II" or whatever mode applies to your receiver it should just work. The channel separation won't be as pin-point precise as it would be with discrete 5.1 audio, and since modern receivers do an okay job at breaking up non-surround stereo audio to use surround speakers effectively, you may not notice as dramatic a difference as you would have in the 90s. Worth checking your settings, but you very well may be hearing what it's supposed to sound like.

DTS should work as long as you have the digital audio output (optical in your player's case) connected to a device that supports DTS, which your receiver should.

Different devices output different volume levels. I wouldn't fret over it.

As for a SCART-to-HDMI converter. Remember that all laserdisc video is in composite on the disc, so whichever device first converts the composite to another format will be a bottleneck on how good your image looks. I wouldn't bet on a SCART-to-HDMI converter doing a better job than your receiver.

Is the noise on motion you're describing deinterlacing artifacts or something else? Can't really answer that without visual.

I think this is pretty helpful regarding AC3 for newbies.....

https://www.lddb.com/help/ac3rf/


..... and this is good for the general history of how audio was encoded on LD from the beginning to the end.

https://www.lddb.com/help/sound/

These two pages alone helped me greatly when got back into Laserdisc.
Welcome from New Zealand

LD really is alot of fun, but their is a bit to learn when it comes to audio,
Which is half the fun because i personally think the audio on LD is very impressive for such a old format

No. Just someone in over their head who feels they don’t have the right player.

Thanks for all the answers.
I will try and get some images of the noise. It’s quite tricky because most of my disks go to a blank screen when I pause them.
Will look at those links and get the details for my amp.

Welcome to the forum Just a quick suggestion to add to the other replies above - try connecting directly from the 2950 composite out to the LGs composite input you just may be in for a pleasant surprise regarding PQ, also make sure the the 2950s HQ Circuit is switched off via the front panel button.

Does it play?? if yes you have the right player.

In this day and age you need multiple players, so if this does or doesn't play AC3 you will get one or mod one that does.

I would also suggest that you find the owners manual for your player or one very similar. LD player owners manuals explain every single feature on the machine and also a good deal about Laserdisc itself.

Hi, welcome to the forum.

I would just plug the composite straight into your television.

I have heard the CLD-2950 is one of the best PAL players.

Unfortunately the composite is removed in the European version of the LG C8, which seems mad.
That's why I was wondering if it was better to get a scart box to HDMI because then the TV would be upscaling rather than the amp.
I'll try and find the owners manual as someone else suggested.
The sound stuff is absolutely boggling my mind.
Am I right in thinking that I won't be able to listen to commentaries unless I collect the white and red leads as they store the track and the Toslink cable doesn't carry it?
The sound side is really confusing me.

Pardon if this is an obvious question, but do you see a yellow 3.5 mm port on the back of your C8? That's a combination yellow-red-white RCA AV input. You just need a little 3x female RCA to male 3.5 mm adapter. I got one that came with my LG C7.

Correct, toslink will not send analog audio, and you can expect commentaries when present to be on analog tracks. The red-white leads will carry both digital (non-DTS and non-AC3) and analog tracks depending on which you select with your remote. I always just use the red-white unless the disc has DTS or AC-3; it keeps it simple.

Unless you have a proper 5.1 sound setup then I wouldn't be too concerned with either AC-3 or DTS. Barring handful of DTS titles (and I do mean handful, there's like three), AC-3 and DTS discs still offer you with a regular stereo track as well that you can watch the movie with.

I'd probably find more use for a player with an optical out since in addition to supporting DTS you can also use it to hook the player up to an outboard DAC that might do a better job than the player itself, or an LD+G decoder.

The only thing on the back of my C8 is an aerial socket, an Ethernet port, 2 USB ports and a 4th HDMI slot. The yellow port that features on the US models isn’t on the European ones.

You mean it doesn't even have a composite in???

A lot of people come here under that impression but aside from that one guy with the “sports” projector they have all turned out to have missed it. They work *very* hard to hide all buttons and ports on new TVs for reasons I can’t understand. Typically these days composite is hidden in the YPbPr socket which itself needs an adapter to run, hidden in an 1/8” TRS jack. On my Sony it’s a downward pointing jack hidden near the recessed area for the cable input.

That is great advice from laserfanhld-gb.

The HQ Circuit got the moniker of the Highly Questionable Circuit in a review back in the day & is pretty spot-on, the image is just so soft when it is on.

The 2950 is a really good player, enjoy .

Been doing a bit of reading up on these LG models and it does seem that the OP is correct in saying that this port is sadly omitted on the European market versions for some crazy reason?

Can I ask the OP - did you try the other option of 2950 s-video out to your Pioneer avr yet? As wisely advised above please avoid connecting to tv using scart to hdmi converter these are generally just cheap and cheerful tat; if you are serious about getting the best from your LD player (or DVD) you need to be looking at a video processor such as e.g. DVDO Edge which has (for composite video) a top quality comb filter on board, these occasionally come up on eBay but when they do you'll have to move fast as they get snapped up pretty quick - there are several alternatives too but these are much costlier. The only other way as signofzeta suggests is get rid of the LG and replace with Sony or perhaps Panasonic which are still fitted with the required composite input and also have superior c/filter & processing over the LGs (especially so the Sony OLEDs)

Finally I don't wish to over complicate things; but as je280 confirms, the Pioneer CLD-2950 & 925 were the best PAL/NTSC players available to us Europeans but it's worth bearing in mind that as good as these players can look with well mastered PAL discs the PQ performance on NTSC LDs falls well short of what even a mid market US or JPN NTSC only player can produce I'm afraid.