DVD Audio ac3 files

Posted by: gert on 13 May 2013

Hi,

I have bought a dual disc (CD+DVD-Audio) (Talking Heads, Remain In Light, 1980, remastered. The DVD comes with 2 channel as well as 6 channel audio data). It certainly is not a high fidelity recording, but I would like to check if I can hear a difference between the CD and the DVD-audio.

I have ripped the DVD-Audio to ac3 files without doing a transcoding. Unfortunately the uniti streamer does not support ac3 files. Now my questions:

1) What is the best way to make the files playable on the uniti? Convert it to flac? Or is there a better way without converting?

2) Does it make sense to compare the ac3 files to the cd audio as ac3 is not a lossless compression (AFAIK)? The 6ch files are 48kHz with 448kb/s. The 2ch files 48kHz with 224kb/s.

Gert

Posted on: 14 May 2013 by Mr Underhill

Hi Gert,

Lies, Damn Lies and Dual Disc.

Dual Disc was marketed as being CD and DVD-Audio, but, from memory, frequently was not. Often it was CD plus some DVD content.

DVD can hold audio up to 24bit 94KHz - stereo.

DVD-Audio can go up to 24/192 - multi-channel.

In this case I believe that you have bought CD plus DVD - but the DVD soundtrack is 5.1 Dolby Digital - hence the AC3.

You need to convert the AC3 (lossy) format into stereo PCM format (lossless) - such as wav, whether you then choose to compress it to flac is your call. I generally use ffmpeg for this kind of thing ........just bare in mind that in doing the conversion the software cannot recreate the missing bits - it will guess.

Personally I wouldn't bother with this. If you like Rush get their Moving Pictures box set, this comes with a HiDef DVD-A as well as CD, you can use this to do some listening tests, once you've ripped the HiDef ST.