I have recently bought a couple of concert DVDs that had a companion CD. Would it be possible (tech wise) to have say the NIN HD DVD packaged with a CD encoded in Lossless PCM or True HD?

CD audio should follow the various standards (redbook, yellowbook, etc). AFAIK, there is no mechanism for the advanced audio formats like TrueHD, since CD bitrates cannot handle the data rate of those formats.

CD does support Lossless PCM: two-channel, good-ol-fashioned stereo. There is no way to support any more throughput of PCM than two channels, since the CD standard bitrates are fixed.

Again AFAIK, there is no software-packing for CD that could get multi-channel into small enough of a bitrate to be stored and read off a CD. And certainly no players that would know what to do with it. TrueHD is still a much higher bitrate than CD could ever support. CD bitrate is set to 44.1kHz of 16bits: 705600 bits per second, or roughly what regular DTS from a DVD spews out at.

The only way to get multichannel on "CD" is using a DTS CD disk, which is really just a data disk with DTS encoding, and you need a player or receiver than can decode the DTS data. And that is lossy encoding, of course.

So the CD technology is just too "slow" (old) to support what you are asking.

shinksma

Wait...are you telling me that all the music stored on CDs are inferior versions of the original masters?

Wait...are you telling me that all the music stored on CDs are inferior versions of the original masters?
Of course but no one sells the original masters. :D

The only way to get multichannel on "CD" is using a DTS CD disk, which is really just a data disk with DTS encoding, and you need a player or receiver than can decode the DTS data. And that is lossy encoding, of course.

So the CD technology is just too "slow" (old) to support what you are asking.

shinksma
According to something I read once the CD specs can handle 4 channel audio.

According to something I read once the CD specs can handle 4 channel audio.

Yeah, Wikipedia has an entry for the possibility, though it seems it was never fully realized. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-channel_compact_disc_digital_audio

And my math above forgot to multiply by number of channels, so CD bitrate is actually about 1.4 Mb/s.

And yeah, CD is almost always an inferior copy to the master tape. Modern digital recordings are at least 24 bit 48 kHz, and analog is, well, analog: the best digital encodings (at 96kHz or higher, 24 bit or 32 bit depth) seem to be considered the equivalent, but some will disagree, so I won't go there.

However, a few artists in the 80's recorded at 16 bit 44.1 khz (or 48 kHz), thinking it was as good as it gets. As a result, those recordings on CD pretty well are as good as they are going to get, unless remixed and remastered (since combining multiple tracks all recorded at 16 bit depth could effectively get you to about the equivalent of 24 bit depth, since no single track uses all the bandwidth of the final mix).

shinksma