DVD-A: A Reality?!?

Posted by: Greg Beatty on 24 September 2001

OK -

I was in Best Buy browsing DVDs and, what do I see? A DVD with the Alice Cooper 'Welcome to My Nightmare' album cover on it? Hum...this must be a concert video or someone has misplaced the CD. But no...it is a DVD-A version. And there's more - the whole column in the DVD section was full of DVD-As!

Anyone know if these are 'dual layer'? I mean, Best Buy sells cheap DVD players. I only found 1 $600 player that said it would play DVD-A's. The rest (presumably) would not. Is this correct?

Then how many customers would buy the DVD-A disk for a premium price compared to the standard CD, go home, pop it in their cheapo DVD player and have it play? If it did play, it would be playing the standard CD layer, yes? Isn't this *extremely* deceptive?

So whas up with DVD-A?

- GregB

Insert Witty Signature Line Here

Posted on: 24 September 2001 by Mike Hanson

I don't believe there is a "CD Layer" on a regular DVD. That's something that SACDs can offer. The player either supports DVD-A, or it doesn't.

Some DVD-A discs also have a regular DVD Dolby Digital or DTS layer, which can play in a regular DVD player with surround sound. Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" is an example. I bought this for curiosity's sake before I got my A/V receiver. When I tried to play it with my non DVD-A player through a 2-channel amp, I got nothing but silence.

Perhaps I could have fiddled with the settings on my DVD player to get it to do some type of translation. However, I didn't have much hope, because my player can decode DTS, but the disc had only DVD-A and Dolby Digital (along with some other DVD-A enhanced mode that I had never heard of before).

BTW, the HDCD playing through my CDS2 et al. sounds better than the DVD doing Dolby Digital via my Sony home theatre setup.

Coincidentally, I was in Tower Records yesterday. The big four-story behemoth here in Toronto is closing down, and the shelves are picked clean of most of their "good stuff". However, I found a comparatively large section of SACDs that people were giving a wide berth.

Even at 40% off, nobody seems to want them.

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

Posted on: 24 September 2001 by Greg Beatty

quote:

Some DVD-A discs also have a regular DVD Dolby Digital or DTS layer, which can play
in a regular DVD player with surround sound.

Seems kinda bizzare to me. Eventually when DVD-A playback trickles down to the cheap players, the user *will have to decide* whether to play:

1) the DVD-A layer, and have conventional 2-channel stereo only, or

2) the Dolby layer, and play back through their 5-channel setup.

Strange.

- GregB

Insert Witty Signature Line Here

Posted on: 24 September 2001 by Mike Hanson

I believe that DVD-A has the ability to do more than 2 channels, if it's encoded that way. The initial spec didn't include it, though.

On the other side, just because it's Dolby Digital doesn't mean they need to encode more than two channels.

In the case of my the Joni Mitchell DVD, the rear surround channels are used only for ambience, while the 2-channels of music is spread ("smeared"?) across the front three speakers.

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

Posted on: 24 September 2001 by Greg Beatty

...I was getting at the largish number of people who own a cheapish surround sound setup. These are the same folks who buy the cheapish DVD players and may buy the DVD-A disks.

They will have to decide between the trick presentation - having all 5.1 speakers going, ambiance in the background, etc. and a standard 2-channel presenatation which is of supposedly better quality. This scenario seems daft to me, that's all. People will be paying for the high-spec DVD-A layer but will probably end up using the 5.1 layer anyway.

How many will view the value added of these disks as the 5.1 layer and never even play the DVD-A layer? How odd...

- GregB

Insert Witty Signature Line Here

Posted on: 24 September 2001 by Mike Hanson

That raises another issue, Greg. I hope that they wouldn't bother placing "ambience" information in the extra channels of the 5.1 layer. The AV/Receivers can do that already. If the record companies are going to do surround sound, they're more likely to re-mix the master into 5 channels. (Heresy!!!) The DVD-A discs are likely to share this same surround sound mix.

In the case of Joni Mitchell's album, they purportedly setup the mics to capture the "real" ambience. Perhaps this is true. Now that I've seen this precedent of using the surrounds purely to add ambience to a two-channel work, I expect that some record companies would fake it occasionally.

Sadly, I think we're going to see two different kinds of discs released: two channel discs for us purists, and surround sound for the hoi polloi. Eventually the market will decree that the purists lose, and we'll be stuck buying CDs at garage sales for "classic" recordings, like vinyl lovers do now.

-=> Mike Hanson <=-

Posted on: 28 September 2001 by Martin M

From what I have read, there are two types of artist as far as DVD-A is concerned:

1)those who like the sound of surround (and in some cases want it no matter how badly it actually suits their music) and will have a 5.1 mix of their music e.g Fleetwood Mac

2) those who just want their music to sound as good as possible e.g Neil Young

I know Neil has re-mastered his analogue back catalogue to 24 bits / 192 kHz 2- channel for release on DVD-A and has no interest in a 5.1 mix on anything. He is thrilled with the results apparently. Lets hope more artist's of Neil calibre follow his example.