Forum - View topicAnswerman - Why Do Discs Use Different Audio Formats?
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Shiflan
 Posts: 418 |
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It seems to me that Justin talked about the most common audio formats that we encounter today. There are many obscure and lesser-used ones; I'm sure it would be impractical to discuss all of them. But in the end I think there are only two conclusions we can draw, and these remain true regardless of which formats we're talking about: 1) A foreign re-release (i.e. dub or sub) can never do any better than the original source provided by the licensor in Japan. Best case scenerio you get an exact digital copy of the orignal soundtrack in whatever format(s) the orginal release used. Anything else would be a necissarily lossy or distorted conversion of that material. It's no different than upscaling video or resizing a computer image--the computer can only guess at the missing data. Sometimes that process is awful. Sometimes it works well. But it will never be "better" than the original; the only excepition would be a full-on remaster, and that's a different beast altogether. 2) None of the acronyms matter much anyway. It's 99% marketingspeak and 1% substance. If you are concerned about the best sound possible, worry about your hardware instead of the discs. Sourcing better speakers (or headphones), amps, etc, will make a far bigger impact than the type of encoding on a disc. So will optimizing your speaker placement in your room (there are plenty of online tools that can help with that). |
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chronos02
Posts: 272 |
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From my experience, it depends in a few factors, the most important one being the encoding quality/setup used to create the AC3 file from the lossless track, if it's done correctly, it's unlikely anyone will ever notice a difference, however, the settings vary depending on the source contents: Action scenes with explosions, deep sounds with smooth transitions, sudden sound variations, complex sounds like orchestral soundtracks, the mix of very different sound profiles such as music with explosions and voices, the lost is almost endless and every situations requires of a different configuration.
Besides the above, another important factor is the output device, the speakers. The less high quality the speakers are, the less likely anyone will notice a difference between an AC3 and a lossless track, and finally, there's the last factor, which I mentioned before, the actual content of the sound track. Releases in which I have noticed a difference between AC3 and linear PCM are from the Ghost in the Shell 1.0 and 2.0 release (the 1.0 disk), and the DVD release using the Japanese track (essentially a 1:1 comparison, since both contain the same, including video and audio, in terms of length, etc.). It's not very noticeable, but during the scene in which the major starts punching the guy that flees through the markets, on top of the shallow water place, the soundtrack is obviously less rich despite its simplicity. Another release in which I noticed something similar is in the Neon Genesis Evangelion - The End of Evangelion between the DTS HD release and the original release, both Japanese releases, though this might be due to some cleaning for the special DTS HD release. There's also the Akira movie which was released with some special audio track that used some weird speaker system, and that was very noticeable, however, I don't think that is something many people would have in their homes. |
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levonr
 Posts: 818 |
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The person's question was referring to A Certain Scientific Railgun S right? It was an odd release, DVD only in 2014 and they apparently couldn't release the blu-ray until 2016. Its like the Japanese company restricted them from making a 5.1 mix along with holding off on the blu-ray release. Also strange is on the 2016 release's back cover lists 5.1 on the blu-ray side and stereo for DVD but in fact there is no 5.1 on the blu-ray's.
As mentioned check your settings to see if its downmixing to stereo properly. When watching in 5.1 I find FUNimation's voices in the center channel very loud actually, I turn the center channel down a little sometimes. It does depend on receiver settings & speakers. |
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MrBonk
Posts: 192 |
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As someone who has worked with audio, sonically. There is a difference.
You can line up two files exactly(compressed, non compressed), and phase cancel them out. Which will leave only the artifacts behind. Setting something up to convert to mid/side stereo and only listening to the side channel, compression artifacts are also much much more audible. (Which is why encoding dedicated LR stereo is important for MP3 quality IMO. Don't recall if a necessary thing to do with codecs like dolby and DTS however) But perceptually, you will not be able to tell one bit at max bit rates compared to lossless. Same goes with high sample rates. (Most people's hearing above 12.5khz isn't adequate enough to notice higher frequencies, and humans top out at just over 20khz if you are lucky anyway. ) Standard MP3 encoding rolls off at 18khz or so, you can force it up to about 20 or 22 ( I can't remember which), and if you have good hearing, you can tell the very subtle difference because it does affect the neighboring frequencies. (Depends on content) But beyond 48khz sample rate or so, you run into the placebo of diminishing returns. Though theoretically it will produce a more accurate representation of the waveforms of all frequencies due to oversampling.( A scope or spectrograph will show the frequencies beyond 20khz, but you can't hear them. And if you could, it's nothing useful. That said, I do prefer my music in FLAC, as most commercial MP3 encodes are not great. |
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