The African Queen - Page 4

If you actually read my comment, you would realize I meant lossy, not just compression on its own. I specifically said said lossless preserves the quality of the source and lossless does not. I stand by that statement. When lossy compression is applied, it does degrade the audio.

Whether that degradation can be heard by a particular individual is irrelevant. It's still degraded.

The point here is, if they can give us lossless, it gives us every opportunity for the best reproduction of the source - good or bad. Lossy compression is always going to be worse to some degree or another.

There is no compelling reason not to give a lossless track. None.

As far as the "uber-purists being unwilling to a soundtrack in DD" line, are you freaking kidding me? The format allows for lossless. That's why people are upset. It's not like it somehow makes the encode more expensive or more time consuming. It should be done right, which is all people are asking for. DD is a leagacy format only included in the spec for those who can't decode lossless. That's all its there for - period.

a link ralph posted in his review section about the restauration of the movie (8 min clip):

http://link.brightcove.com/services/...id=72516433001

If you are familiar with most of the time based sound effects used with guitars like phase shifters and flangers most of those were originally created with tape decks. If you had 2 tape decks and one wasn't locked well to the other you would get weird phase shifting as one deck would be holding speed and the frequency would stay constant and the other deck speeded up or slowed down in comparison and the frequency would go up and down with the speed. A stretched tape could also create similar effects even when the decks were running at the exact same speed.

Flanging came about when people started pressing their finger against the flange of the tape reel to actually force it to speed up and slow down.


The key here is the word usually. Does it matter if every thing below 20hz and above 20khz gets thrown out if there is no signal on the original media below 35 hz or above 16khz? Hell there are lots of modern mics that won't do 20 - 20khz and the ones that can are often rolled off on one end or the other to get rid of unwanted sounds like 60hz hum, rumble, breathing, foot steps etc. You also had to roll off the bottom end to keep from saturating the tape. On play back a lot of the top end gets tossed out because it is all tape hiss.

Don't forget that Dolby 'A' wasn't created until the end of the 60's. Dolby 'C' wasn't until the 80's. Dolby 'C' bought you 15db of noise reduction. But even Dolby 'C' on an analogue deck is weak compared to DD that is available on a DVD. African Queen was done nearly 20 years before any of that crazy science fiction stuff like Dolby 'A' ever came along.

One of my favourite albums of all time is Allied Forces from Triumph recorded in 1981. Even on the most recent remastering of it I just want to cry when I hear how much is missing due to the equipment it was originally recorded on. That was all recorded in a state of the art studio with awesome condenser mics like the C-414 available. The tape and tape decks of the time just weren't up to modern standards.

Begs the question, what is the motivation to employ lossy techniques in the first place?

Art

Cost, most likely, in the case of lossy for the SD DVD and no lossless for the BD. SD DVD doesn't support the new lossless formats. And in this case, "they" may have thought the quality of the original soundtrack doesn't suffer from lossy compression. But given what we've seen with various releases (audio and video) there is no clear cut rationale.

larry

Backward compatibility. They often release a companion DVD version when a BD comes out, so they need to create a mix that can be read by them anyway.

Plus, not everyone is set up to utilize lossless codecs, even if they have Blu-ray. You have to accommodate those people or you run the risk of almost no one being able to enjoy the format.

The BD specs require that ALL discs containing HD audio must also have a legacy alternate track. With DTHD, that means a separate DD track, with DTS that means the lossy core. So it's not a matter of choice for studios, except whether to include a lossless track at all.

...and where in my post do I dispute that?

My response was to the question as to why they bother with a lossy encode at all. The reason is for legacy compatibility. Lossless audio has no bearing on that.

Got it,thanks !

Art

I have a real hard time believing that a mono track of a mostly on-location recording would benefit from being loss-less.
Considering the SNR and dynamic range of the equipment used, Dolby Digital would most probably yield everything the track has.
Throwing more bits at it isn't going to create resolution, dynamic range and upper frequency information that isn't there in the first place.
IMO, this is the usual AVS "I bitch, therefore I am".

The problem is we don't KNOW what the source material truly sounds like.

As others have pointed out, the price for this release is very high when compared with comparable BDs.
The rights for this title have been fought over for a very long time (which is why it has never been released to DVD before).

Studios are motivated by $$$.
Why incur greater costs for this release when the same audio track can be used for both DVD and BD?



Welcome to the "real" world of AVS.

Are you trying to say it isn't real?????

Non-HiDef soundtrack on a HiDef disc...
I'm cool with that.

I think this film is too old for HiDef as well...
heck, its not even widescreen!

The Paramount BD should have SD video & lossy audio...
cause its "Paramount" too save $$$!!!

At this point on blu-ray Disc, the answer is stupidity and ignorance.

Really.

it's luck of the draw with productions like this who gets in charge of making what decision, and all you need is some kid out of tech school who like pushing dials to eleven who's never sat down and listened to stereo recording on a good system to learn how to *hear* what a mix really sounds like. I hear so many people who work in "the industry" say utterly untrue things like "at 360 kbps Apple lossless sounds just like the original" when even driving *in my car on the highway over my car speakers* I can hear the difference. Worse than the new kid out of tech school who's never heard a lossless recording played back properly on a good system are the old-time techs who can't hear either but who get incensed by all the talk from audiphiles who say that they can... so they resent others talking about differences they they themselves can't or don't want to perceive, so they opt for lossy audio out of passive-agressive resentment. Think that sounds more like group therapy than blu-ray Disc production? The groups of people in charge of getting our content on 1080p disc are people just like the people we work with at our own places of employment. I'm sure we could all recount stories of how personal drama and political in-house debates were behind some sort of bad decision that shouldn't have been made, but was anyway.

There's no implicit "trust" in the studios we should have on issues like this. If we want audio that's transparent to the master, we need to demand it, so the studios will add that to their production check-list for our next beloved classic title coming to blu.


The catch is that there's no way to prove that a give bitrate with lossy will be transparent to all listeners with all content. What the five guys say is "the same" in one listening panel might not sound the same to you or me. Or might not sound the same with a different type of audio recording. Lossless provides transparency to 100% of listeners with 100% of recorded content. That's the right answer for all Blu-ray Disc releases, as you so rightly state.


Agreed.


Agreed.



The same compressed file can't be used twice anyway as the authoring specs for BD are slightly different than DVD. In addition, there's ALWAYS A LOSSLESS MASTER available to be used... where do you think the lossy track came from? And it costs NOTHING more to put that on blu-ray Disc. Nothing.

You obviously have no idea how film production works. There's no such thing as "on-location" audio. Audio is recorded as a reference, but is nearly entirely replaced by ADR and Foley sounds. If they used the location dialog as it was recorded, the audio would change at every single camera angle and even from shot to shot since it may take days (or even weeks) to shoot one angle of a scene. Plus, you have things like airplanes and even noise from the crew and directions from the director intruding into the mix. Back then, even the cameras were incredibly noisy and often needed to be placed in a sound box in the studio or even that audio would need to be scrapped. On location, wind noise and other elements pretty much made that irrelevant since the sound was scrapped anyway.

Further, those "location shoots" were often not as "location" as you might think. While some wide shots might be shot there, the close-ups were often shot on a sound stage reproducing the location (often employing rear projection or large backdrops with small amounts of set details to disguise them). Even then, much of the audio is replaced or sweetened in those instances.


Of course, now we'll never know. Keep in mind, much of the dialog was re-recorded in a sound booth with studio multi-track equipment after principle photography completed - as is still common practice.


On the other hand, throwing away bits isn't going to improve things. More bits may not make an improvement, but ditching them has a greater likelihood of making it worse.

Lossless doesn't "benefit" any soundtrack, ever. It merely doesn't *further degrade* the sound.

It's not an enhancement: it's merely transparency to the source.

This is true for any recording, good or bad: taking an already-compromised audio signal, and compressing it with lossy audio, makes it sound even worse. Lossless keeps things from getting worse. Which is why audiophiles want it, and which is why it should be used for every blu-ray Disc.

Amidst all this lossless audio hubbub, let's not let the fact that it looks stunning fall by the wayside

All the more reason to be disappointed that something as simple as putting the lossless audio track on the disc was something paramount just didn't feel like bothering to do for this classic title.

We're pleased as punch with the stunning image, but the studios need to learn the lossless-audio lesson, and just when we think we can stop worrying they pull crap like this. that's why there's hubbub... Now if Paramount could just learn to click their lossless-audio checkbox when making the sound master, we'd have what our classic films, and their fans. really deserve.

Especially since the studios see fit to charge more for the BD version.

Either it's going to be a premium product or it's not.

You can charge extra for those fancy-looking little cucumber finger sandwiches, but at the end of the day, it's still just a tiny sandwich that leaves you feeling empty.

Sorry, but you're very wrong.

Difference or not, lossless will provide whatever sound that is true to the source. Lossy has the potential to change it or degrade it.

However, the real point here is, if they're going to bill this format as having "improved image and sound", then charge a premium for it, it had damned well better provide every opportunity to do so.

That means high enough bit rates, quality transfers and the best possible audio format. Period.

Wow, the screen caps for this one are just flat out gorgeous!

While in theory I'm always on board with demanding HD audio, the nature of the material allows me to stomach the 2.0 DD track and the option to own this movie in glorious HD video is more than enough for me to make the purchase. I just have to support a catalog title like this getting a spectacular restoration because I want to see more like it!

Just like they want to "feel better" about 1080p video than 480p? Just as with higher resolution video, the reason we'd "feel" better with lossless audio presentation is because lossless *is* better.


Lossy, by definition, does NOT capture everything in that soundtrack.

and there's no audio test that can conclusively prove that a given lossy encode is transparent for all listeners with all content types. So it can never be stated as fact that a lossy encode is "transparent" to the source.


Agreed, but it's Paramount.


Not true. Since it's a *fact* that lossless is 100% transparent to 100% of listeners with 100% of all audio content, but the same cannot be said of lossy compression, wanting lossless audio is a very logical, rational, supportable position and those of us who advocate for its use on blu-ray Disc do so with all blu-ray disc releases. This is not an emotion-based title-specific push.


No. We're just saying like we always have with every film that blu-ray's mission should be to deliver picture *and* sound as transparently as possible to the source. In fact, the very nature of this problem is that the studios feel that when a soundtrack is *not* the holy grail to start with, that lossless isn't needed. The point that we're raising is that even non-optimal (non Holy-Grail) audio recordings should be delivered losslessly rather than being further degraded.


That's the most rediculous thing anyone has said yet... that allowing a compression codec to degrade an audio signal is somehow making it better.

If there are problems with the soundtrack, it's the job of the audio mastering engineer to fix those problems. Then it's the job of the authored blu-ray Disc to faithfully deliver that master.


For a dead horse, it's a bit surprising how much myth is still perpetuated by folks who don't understand how and why transparent audio reproduction of classic films is as imporant as transparent video reproduction.

I find the PQ really good on this disc. only thing I noticed is that some shots with katherine hepburn's face (or just her facial area) sometimes tend to be a little softer than the rest of the movie.

Older movies tended to use a soft filter on the camera when shooting closeups of the actresses to give them a kind of "rosy glow" and aura of perfection.

That may be it or... DNR of some sort.

Lossless audio should be used 100% of the time. I have PCM mono tracks from the old laserdisc days that sound noticeably better (fuller) than the DD lossy mono tracks on their DVD counterparts.

its doesnt really look DNR'ed or grainless...which doesnt mean of course that no kind of DNR has never been used at all. criterion also stated that they used very light DNR in the case of 'bigger than life' and the picture still looks grainy and fantastic.

Thank you DaVID Boulet for making the argument for lossless better than I.

Saying that Paramount should have provided lossless audio is "overdone" criticism? Has anyone called a boycott on Paramount or that we send them hate mail? It seems that most of this "severe" criticism is basically folks saying Paramount should have delivered the audio losslessly and in a calm and reasoned manner doing their best to explain the principle of lossless encoding for those who may not be aware of how it's just as suitable for older vintage mono recordings as it is for newer state of the art multichannel soundtracks.


???

First. Lossy compression always changes the signal. Always. The only question is how much does it change, and what percentage of listeners are likely to notice. The closer to lossless, the fewer and fewer listeners there are who should be able to here the continually diminishing change. However, there's NO WAY to know for sure when a threshold of transparency to the master is crossed because you can't test all listeners. Therefore, Lossless is the logical way to present a faithful representation of the PCM master.


When we say "transparent to the master" the best that lossless can do is, naturally, deliver transparency to the LPCM master it's derived from.

Whether or not that studio LPCM master itself is transparent to the analog audio elements is a different discussion that involves recording methodologies, a/d conversion, and digital/analog clean-up tools that may or may not preserve fidelity to the source. Those are important concerns, but they are mastering concerns, and certainly whatever mastering choices are made, it couldn't be considered good to introduce an additional step of degradation from lossy encode/decode.


What are you comparing? What do you mean by "correctly"? Do you mean losslessly at 16 bit versus a lossy 24 bit? Why not a lossless 24 bit since there's room? Naturally when someone suggest that 24 bits is better than 16 it is based on *all other things being equal* in the comparison. Running a mag recording through the calibrated heads that recorded the tape in the first place and doing an a/d at 16 bits may sound better than running the mag through a machine from another manufacturer but doing the a/d at 24 bits. That's not a comparison of 16 to 24 bits, that's an issue of better or worse mastering choices. Given any particular choice that's made, doing it at 24 bits would yield more accurate results than doing it at 16. The same principle applies to lossless versus lossy: given any particular PCM master that is produced, a lossy encode/decode cycle cannot ensure transparency to that same PCM master for all listeners, but the lossless encode can. Naturally, making sure that the PCM master itself is the best it can be is important as well. But that in no way suggests that once that PCM master has been created, that it shouldn't be provided bit-for-bit on blu-ray.


Sure. And I'd simply ask for the mono track to be provided bit-for-bit identical to the studio PCM master.


Not sure where I misread your original tone but assuming I did, next point.


Sure. And while you're at it why not get the president of Toyota to tell us that there's no problem with their cars accelerating.


And there's nothing to prove that the lossy IS indistinguishable either. However, the TrueHD is transparent by definition. So how can you logically suggest there's even a debate on this point?


I respect your audiophile credentials.


How "important" is it to have a blu-ray disc deliver audio that is, by definition, transparent to the PCM master? Since it's entirely possible to achieve this with Blu-ray's bandwidth and space, shouldn't transparency be assured on all titles for all content? I never suggested that anyone should boycott the title, only that we urge Paramount to provide 100% transparent-to-the (pcm) master audio encodes. I fail to see how suggesting this basic point that we all ought to be able to take for granted is misguided.

With the lack of anamorphic on DVD, or Edge enhancement, or DNR, we always get folks who say "it's not that important". yet without someone actually being critical when it happens, the studios would never improve their mastering/authoring. Rather than be bothered by folks who care more about pushing for lossless audio than you do, you should be thankful that other people are doing the work to educate the HT community to hold the studios to a higher standard for video and audio transparency so that you, me, our films, and everyone can benefit in the long run.


Unless RAH was doing a direct comparison with the lossy-compressed soundtrack to the LPCM studio master, then his comments about the audio don't shed any light on the discussion of transparency.

These two HTF members do an excellent job of responding to RAH's musings about compressed versus uncompressed audio:


My own comments to RAH are posted here:

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/foru...0#post_3673317

^Mr. RAH has often carried water for others.
I have no idea why anyone would take his pronouncements at face value.

And you use that acoustically correct room to play recorded music from 192kbps MP3 files. Right?

Every time I've doubted his advice, I've found out on my own that his opine was more valid than mine. He has my R-E-S-P-E-C-T. I hope wisdom is contagious. If it is, I might be a'growin' a crop.