The African Queen - Page 3

224 kbps is sheer stupidity after the restoration effort that went into it. Saying 224 lbps is acceptable is like saying mpeg-2 at 8 mbps will do for the picture.

It's almost as if they are giving the finger to a certain group of internet activists.

Standard operating procedures with WB.

Eh? This is a Paramount release. Or, are you referring to something Warner is doing/not doing?

Doug

Actually, no it's not. This is a 2-ch mono track. At similar compression, a 6-ch track would be 640K. Seems more than adequate to me, given the material. In any case, I'll wait till I hear it before passing judgment.

It is????
OK, now THAT is embarrassing.
Sorry, I am so accustomed to WB doing stuff like this....

Hah! Now you know how I feel. I'm the king of posting silly gaffes.

Doug

Passing judgment after you watch & listen?
What part of Crazytown are you from?
No chance to snivel & whine for weeks about it?
Blame Warner or Paramount or Fox or whoever the incompetent droogs are responsible for this unmitigated fiasco?
Do you know where you're at?
Have you come totally unhinged?
I think I need to pm a mod about this abuse.

Sorry, I lost control there for a minute.

And 640 kbps is just as unacceptable for a 5.1 trackon a 50gb disc.

Actually even for mono tracks now Warner is using True HD as they should.

Mono optical tracks can sound wonderful if they're transferred properly from appropriate source materials. The trouble is this rarely happens as most post houses encourage the scanning of track negatives rather than go to the expense of sending the neg to a lab and have a positive print made and the clients go for it to save a buck.
A scanned track negative sounds wretched to me and when positive optical tracks are used they are usually processed to remove hiss and other anomolies and you finish up sacrificing high frequency (surprisingly optical does have it) and transparency, so to me it is a waste of time making a lossless track.
I am not saying this applies to all studios but it does happen.

Making a lossless track involves no time. Compressing a lossless master takes time. Which makes this utterly confusing.

None of this justifies the final encode.

No matter how bad the source or what it goes through in the process, if the final encode uses lossy compression, it will only be worse. Lossless preserves any quality left within the source, no matter how bad it started out.

Every time something is compressed, it degrades quality.

I agree with that comment.

Personally, I would prefer a properly reproduced optical track compressed, rather than a processed one, lossless.

Completely disagree.

A processed soundtrack can improve defects in the original audio due to age or neglect. Compression is never an improvement - and you have any issues with the original audio still in there.

I think this is true ... and irrelevant to the question being discussed -- whether lossless ought to have been included.

But there's a deeper question.

What (of significance) can really be inferred from this preference for "properly reproduced lossy" over "processed lossless"?

As a structural analogy: I would certainly prefer a properly cooked Big Mac to the world's best hamburger improperly cooked. (Burnt or raw, let's say.)

What does this show -- that a Big Mac is better than the world's best hamburger? No way!

Does it even show that "proper cooking is the important thing"? That can't be right either. Chefs will tell you the ingredients, the recipe etc is every bit as important.

I tend to feel that _nothing_ of much interest follows from this preference.

Ceteris paribus, lossless > lossy.

Ceteris paribus, the worlds best burger > Big Mac.

To observe that lossless or the world's best burger _can_ be prepared improperly, and that in that case it wouldn't be preferable, isn't to say much at all.

On internet forums I often run into this kind of inference:

"I'd rather hear a terrific lossy mix (e.g. DD Transformers) than a crappy mix in a lossless presentation. Therefore the quality of the mix is more important than whether or not the audio has been compressed."

This inference is simply invalid.

It doesn't follow from a preference for a good lossy mix that mix quality counts for more than the audio bit rate. To revisit the hamburger example, it doesn't follow from a preference for a cooked Big Mac to an uncooked "world's best burger" that the cooking is more important than the recipe and ingredients. It isn't.

Hamburgers of course are totally unlike audio. But they serve as a counterexample to the inference (of that form).

A few more thoughts.

The best mixing in the world can't rescue a soundtrack from the effects of excessive compression.

The best cooking in the world can't make a Big Mac a really good burger.

A person can prefer one or the other for any variety of reasons. The reasons can be totally disconnected from what might be most important in delivering good sound or a good burger. In some cases, about this preference there will be surprisingly little to say.

Thankyou Walt73 for explaining it better than I ever could. An 'in-the-know' co-worker helped me to explain it better:
"I would rather have a properly reproduced track in a lossy format, than a lossless file of an overly processed reproduced optical soundtrack".

Except that at bitrates we are talking about, difference between lossy and lossless may not be obvious depending on state of your gear and ear, whereas results from poor mixing can be very obvious regardless of your gear or ear.

That's simply not true, at least if you're talking about audible quality. There are abundant examples of lossless audio tracks that sound like crap and lossy ones that do not.

A difference that makes no difference is no difference. A blind obsession with stats and specs for their own sake adds nothing to a discussion. Does lossy compression cost bits? Sure. Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not.

This conversation is very interesting, and I appreciate those of us who are sharing their knowledge. It is, however, a purely academic discussion.

We'd all be better able to judge if The African Queen had both a lossless mono track, as well as the low bit-rate DD mono track (using the same mix on both tracks). That's the only way to know if any of us could actually hear the difference.

And, as others have already stated, they start out with a lossless digital track, then they have to convert it to DD. Why didn't they just give us the lossless? There's apparently room on the disc for it. What was the point of compressing it using DD?

Doug

Mr. Pickard is correct. If you feed crap in, there's no use arguing if it's lossless or compressed. It's still going to be crap. If the track was mastered from a negative, you can pretty much forget any chances of it sounding good. What most studios bank on is true-- most consumers, even fans such as those posting here, have never heard good optical or mag sound, particularly on these older pictures, and therefore have no point of reference.

I also have to disagree with the person who previously posted that optical tracks from that era carry no fidelity. They carry great fidelity-- you just probably haven't heard it presented properly. The ribbon mics (not carbon) that were used from that era have an incredible range with exceptionally low noise levels. The RCA-44 is still considered one of the best microphones ever made and commands prices of over $5,000 in even this market.

Likewise, the Western Electric density track, like the one used on AQ, even after the Academy Roll-off, has a transparency that doesn't often translate to video for broadcast or home video purpose because the facilities usually roll off the low end to compensate for most consumers' puny speakers.

This is AVS please keep your statements factual. Lossless compression does not degrade any thing. If you take loss less out of the equation then you are still left with

Every time something is compressed, it has the potential to degrade quality.

I think a lot of the people who have gone all knee jerk here have no hands on experience with early audio recording equipment. I hate lossy compression more than 90% of the people on this forum and I definitely hear the difference on modern recordings. Hell listening to cymbals on a CD drives me absolutely nuts.

The problem with DD and DTS is that they throw parts of the recording away because they believe that those parts aren't audible or are inconsequential. What seems to be getting missed here is that with the recordings we have here a lot of that information that would get thrown out never existed to begin with.

As for the uber-purists that can't bring them selves to listen to the sound track in DD I really have to ask what are you doing listening to it in digital at all? Obviously if you are such a discerning purist then there is no way that you would put up with tragedy of going through an A/D converter and then going back through a D/A converter coming back with it's anti-aliasing filters etc. I am also sure that all of you have turned off your equalizers as well so that there is no loss from the comb filtering effect of the EQ. I could probably list a dozen other things as well that would have just as much of an effect if not more on this title.

I love lossless audio and if you want to go to war over the inclusion of only DD on scores of movies from the first couple of years of Blu-ray sign me up. I full understand how important this movie is. But with this title the argument is a bit like saying you won't watch LotR because they aren't giving you the ultra violet light in the picture.

What I would like is both the unrestored and the restored track. Lossless would be nice, but you can hear a HUGE difference in the restoration video, and while noise and distortion are both dramatically reduced in the restored version, there's a weird "phasey" sound to the background (non dialog) sounds.

As far as how good the original recording could sound, I used to own a 1950's era studio recorder, the Ampex 300, and believe me, at 30 ips half track that thing made wonderful recordings. I have no idea how the original recording was made, but this machine debuted in 1949 so the technology for excellent sound -even by today's standards - was available when they made this film.

I agree ... but the question (wrt the original observation) I'm asking is, So what?

What follows from the original observation (which I don't dispute) - that it's preferable to have a good lossy mix over a poor lossless one? what does it have to do with the ongoing lossy vs lossless debate that keeps coming up here and on blu-ray.com and on other forums?

To pursue a better analogy than the Big Mac vs a decent burger. Let's forget about recorded sound and consider live sound.

If you ask an engineer, How do you get a really good live sound? the first, and I mean the first thing he will say is Put the band in a good-sounding hall.

Don't put the band in a subway tunnel! Put it in Radio City or Massey Hall or any of the other famous venues reputed to have great acoustics.

Uncontroversial, right?

But suppose a clever person remarks:

Hold on a minute. I'd rather hear an IN-TUNE band playing in a subway tunnel, than an OUT-OF-TUNE band playing in Massey Hall.

Uncontroversial also. But then - what the heck does this observation have to do with what we call good live sound ??!

Does it show that it's more important to good live sound to tune the band than to position it in a good sounding hall?

I don't think so. Because I think that tuning the band is irrelevant to what we ordinarily call good live sound.

I got one for ya.

A famous acoustical engineer was once asked: What makes a truly great live sound?
His reply: Tune the orchestra, man. Tune the orchestra!

That has the form of a joke. It looks like a joke since the answer is strictly irrelevant to what was meant by the question.

Here's another irrelevant observation:

It's preferable to listen to a real live band in a subway tunnel than a group of corpses in Massey Hall.

Variables such as the tuning of the band, the vitality of the performers and so on certainly have an effect on what's preferable to listen to. However, they are simply not the ingredients of what constitutes a good live sound. (That has to do with fundamental acoustical properties of the room, not properties of the performers.)

What makes a good live sound, in the ordinary sense in which anybody would usually ask about it, involves (firstly) acoustical properties of the venue.

What about modern recorded sound? I think there are two main aspects to a good recorded sound:

(i) the integrity (quality, fidelity or whatever) of the digital signal chain (broadly understood)
(ii) the integrity (quality/fidelity) of the analogue signal chain (both before and after the digital part - from mic through mixing board to ADC, then at the other end from DAC to preamp and so on out into the room)

I'll ignore (ii) since the lossless/lossy debate is focussed on (i).

I think that when people on the forums object that such-and-such a Blu-ray lacks lossless, their objection comes from a certain standpoint - the standpoint of what constitutes good recorded sound (in the ordinary sense).

Perhaps more accurately they're concerned with the possibility of hearing a truly great recorded sound. I hope I don't beg any questions by assuming that without a lossless codec, a truly great sound is not really possible. (Acknowledging hand-waving about good vs great sound here, what it could mean and how subjective it is.)

Lossless activists on the forums are implicitly asking, I think, What do we need for the discs to be capable of great sound? Many Blu-ray fans are insisting on lossless because they want at least the chance for the soundtracks to be great.

They're not focussed on the actual state of the extant analogue master or what some mixing guy happens to do on his console. Whatever the mixing guy does is in a sense a matter of accident - it's got nothing to do with the possibility of great sound.

(It's as though the lossless fans are focussed on the modal property of the possibility of great sound, whereas the lossy apologists are focussed on the actuality of what things end up sounding like and whether they can still sound quite good.)

A lossy codec is a kind of bottleneck, a compromise in the digital signal chain. It's not ideal. Something is usually lost. (The effects on soundstage, dynamic range, frequency response are well documented.) Even when it's tough to hear the difference, it's a fact that it's a compromise on what constitutes good recorded sound (in the ordinary sense).

I think that when the lossy apologists reply to this by saying, It's preferable to have a good lossy mix than a poor lossless one -- a confusion has happened.

The confusion is that the mix is irrelevant to the consitution of good sound - or achieving at least the possibility of truly great sound - which the lossless activists are insisting on.

The lossy apologist is not speaking directly to the concerns of the lossless activist, which have to do with preserving the integrity/quality of the digital signal chain and are unconcerned with the actuality of how things might turn out -- just as the acoustical engineer is unconcerned with the tuning of the orchestra. (Except in jest.)

It's like two guys listening to a band playing in a subway tunnel. The one says, We should get this band playing in a good-sounding hall, and the other says, Well, it's better to keep em in tune in the tunnel than change the venue and have em drift out of tune on the way.

I think the lossy/lossless debate is exactly like this, whenever somebody brings something as extraneous as the mix into the discussion.

This is already way too tl;dr and getting repetitive so I will stop abruptly. Thanks for the patience of everyone who read down this far!

Good response, walt. One thing you left out is that the most important link in the chain is our brain. If we believe lossless audio is undoubtedly better than lossy in any situation, that's what our brain will hear. If we believe otherwise, then it's not going to be noticeable no matter how obvious we try to make the difference. That's why 2 people listening or watching the same presentation can have 2 genuinely opposite perception.