Star Trek TNG Seasons Remastered on Blu-Ray - Page 66

I noticed that too, thankfully it's very brief.

Watched Haven yesterday, and as soon as the ****ed up dialogue kicked in I switched to the 2.0 track, but even that track has some TERRIBLE phasing errors for a minute or two as Picard records one of his logs. His voice starts coming straight out of the rear speakers and seems to bounce around the sound stage at random. That brief problem aiside, the 2.0 tracks - all 192 kbps of them - would do me just fine going forward. They sound great decoded using Neo 6 or DPLIIx, and they expose the 7.1 mixes for the wastes of space that they are.

The 2.0 track is terrible because it comes out of the rear speakers? Umm...

So, sales figures are out:

http://www.the-numbers.com/weekly-bluray-sales-chart

95,435 units sold for a total of 5.7 million in sales.

Pretty solid sales figures... considering S1 is one of the least liked. I'd say they're well on their way to recouping that $9 million they put into it, even subtracting the cost of the disc replacement program (if every single consumer participated, it would cost them about $2 per disc, so about $572,610). But I doubt everyone is even aware of the problem.

Here's hoping they recognize that pricing the sets below $60 will make them more money in the long run.

I've emailed my info and my question is have you guys gotten a response when you send your info? A confirmation perhaps or that's it? Also sorry for being ignorant but how can I know if there's a flaw on my disc? I read about the problem in 7.1 surround but I guess for a regular guy like me, i couldn't probably tell what the problem is unless somebody can enlighten me or is there a video somewhere out there that can show those problems?

I called the phone number, but I heard that people who emailed only get the one response asking for the disc ID and your info -- no follow up email.

As for the sound issues, if you bought the set, you've got the flaw! If you have a 5.1 or 7.1 system, put your ear up to the front left and right speakers on “Encounter at Farpoint”, “Hide and Q”, “Haven”, “The Big Goodbye”, Datalore”, “11001001″ or “Too Short a Season”.

You should hear dialogue there (in addition to the center channel) which is wrong. And in the case of “Farpoint”, you’ll hear dialogue in the center and right only.

And if you hook your blu-ray player directly to your HDTV, you’ll hear a bad echo on “11001001″ and during most of “Haven” on the TV’s stereo speakers using the 7.1 track.

Nope. I responded back to the person that emailed me, but never got a response back from her.

Same here (was it Ana?). I hope the response will be the replacement discs.

I just sent one e-mail w/ all the info, but didn't get a response. I just now called, and before giving the info again, I told the guy about the e-mail, but he didn't seem interested in checking to see if I was already on their list. So, I gave the info again.

Let's see if I get two replacement sets...

Read it again. The DIALOGUE starts coming out of the rear speakers and then bounces around the sound field at random before it settles in the centre speaker. Somehow, I don't think that's intentional.

Please, I'm not trying to be a d!ck. You originally stated, "I switched to the 2.0 track, but even that track has some TERRIBLE phasing errors for a minute or two as Picard records one of his logs. His voice starts coming straight out of the rear speakers and seems to bounce around the sound stage at random." By that you make it sound like the 2.0 stereo track contains rear-channel information. I was just looking for clarification. If that is what you mean, then I haven't experienced that. Such a thing shouldn't even be possible... Do you have PLII active?

I would've thought that me writing "They sound great decoded using Neo 6 or DPLIIx" in that same post was the tip-off that I do indeed have DPLII 'active'.

Edit: And y'know what? The phasing error is so bad that it's clearly obvious when I listened to that bit in straight stereo, it literally sounds like it's coming from behind.

You were mixing the pros and cons of the stereo track worse than the CBS engineers mixed the 7.1 track - I could understand you!

Seriously though, I agree that the stereo track alone or using PLII (or similar) is better than the 7.1 track any day of the week. All the more reason for future seasons to use the LOSSLESS stereo mix like the sampler...

Yes. It was "Ana".

Thanks for the explanation, now I understand, if you hadn't told me about it and known about it from the news, I would think it's just normal the way it sounds. I hope others like me are informed and will get the replacements too.

Came in at #4 for the week with 95,435 copies sold for sales of $5,725,123.

Seems like good #s.

You don't seem to get how matrix surround sound works. Dolby Surround, Pro Logic, Pro Logic II (Movie and Music) and even dts Neo use the out of phase material (L-R) content in a stereo signal to derive a surround channel. Every stereo source has out of phase material, this is how Dolby encodes those tracks. The common mono element (L+R) gets sent to the center channel.

I haven't heard these TNG discs yet, but if there is a phase problem as the initial poster suggets, then yes indeed, dialogue will inadvertently be sent to the surrounds by the decoder. As stated above, dialogue should be coming from the center.

Thanks, but I do understand. Since TNG wasn't encoded with Dolby Surround/Dolby Stereo until season 4, it shouldn't be happening at all. You're a bit late to the party anyway, I originally misread his post thinking he was getting surround activity from the 2.0 track - without PL active. So, anyone else want a piece of this freshly beaten dead horse?

Any stereo signal (whether Dolby encoded or not) will have out of phase and in phase material.

Right, but if you don't have some sort of ProLogic running on your AVR, you would never hear it come from an active rear driver. If dialog or sound effects or music are recorded in a live room/set, then the stereo audio will exhibit greater variance in phase than if it were recorded in a padded studio. So, with the masterful audio of TNG Season 1 (:sarcasm:), such a thing wouldn't be impossible. It could sound as though it is coming from the rear even when in a direct stereo mode on the AVR (like Geoff D cited), it wouldn't actually be activating the rear driver. Again, this all stems from me misreading his initial post on the topic. I thought he was claiming that he had discrete rear activity while using the 2.0 mode withOUT PL. Again, I fully acknowledge my error and hereby apologize to the whole Internetz.

Personally, I love my 7.1 system as the additional rear speakers make a huge difference to sensing when sound is from the rear or from the sides. I use Pro Logic IIx for EVERYTHING as it feels so isolating when those rear speakers go quiet once you are used to it.

However I tend to agree that either a lossless 2.0 or at most a lossless 5.1 is sufficient for Pro Logic IIx to do its magic. Certainly if dropping to 5.1 allows upping the stereo mix to lossless its a worthy cause.

Sure it would be nice to have a good lossless 7.1 one track, but if it increases the chance of errors and decreases the chance of us getting the later seasons released due to cost of production, then its not worth it.

One thing is for sure though, the clarity on the 7.1 track is astonishing compared to the average sound quality of season 1 when I have watched it on the TV. Some broadcasters seem to have a very muffled track for the early TNG seasons where its hard to make out what anyone is saying, even the buggy 7.1 track is infinitely better than that.

To be fair, I wasn't even sure the 7.1 track was faulty until I read the specifics on the forum and realised that the bits I thought sounded "weird" were indeed mistakes, not deliberate decisions.

It didn't ruin my enjoyment of the box set though as I was too busy loving the extra clarity, although I didn't watch Encounter at Farpoint (having seen it recently on the sampler) until reading this thread, that was immediately apparent that dialogue was coming from the right which seemed odd. But again, I would have just assumed it was intentional.

That still something very common with local stations: AGC (automatic Gain Control) which eliminates the need for the master control room operator to actually have to set a proper fader level on a source. It also boosts quiet parts and creates hiss in them while squashing louder sounds down until the entire mix gets muddy in those parts. It would be worse with something like TNG which would be recorded, then aired back later on a deck that likely had the limiter turned on.

I know there are still stations that do that stuff with the audio because the local CBS affiliate here does it. It's annoying to have the hiss and other background noise creep up during quiet parts of a show, only to have dialog get lost in with the other sounds when things heat up.

It didn't get much better on the video side either if the operator actually used the color bars Paramount provided for the show because they skewed too red, meaning setting levels to them made the show slightly green. Probably not due to the same issue, but I noticed that when the SciFi channel used to air Knight Rider re-runs, they always skewed it green on certain days - always the same days each week. In other words, they had an operator that didn't realize the opening credits were supposed to appear purple and tried to make the desert shots look normal.
Edited by NetworkTV - 8/9/12 at 10:04am

It's been several years since I've been in a master control room - I'm on the post production side - but I find this hard it believe. Networks and TV stations are supposed to do nothing to the signal off the tapes (files, nowadays) they air, especially now that everything is digital and there's little to calibrate. The burden of getting picture and audio perfect ("legal") is up to post production. We're given a strict set of delivery requirements - handbooks that span dozens of pages - and the masters must pass QC. If the dialog is too quiet, colors are off, etc. it fails QC and bounces back to the post house to fix.

Really all I'm saying is, I'm not denying any audio or video problems - I just presume that they're baked in the masters and not added by the stations.

Digital production and unified reference levels are still easier said than done with local television stations. With FTP download deliveries, most spots and programs can be kept digital and dumped essentially direct to a station server via a format transcoder without any manual adjustments. And with so many companies making their own shows and spots on a budget, the task of audio in those cases often falls on the guy who is shooting and editing the video. "Home grown" spots & programs like this are now everywhere. The only way to combat this is with limiters and compression.

With that said, a good high dollar compressor will not draw attention to itself under tough situations, nor will it raise the floor noise. Thankfully there is now quality gear like this out there and in widespread use. Unfortunately I'm sure some stations still have outdated garbage compression that was garbage when it first came out. One of my audio pet-peeves was a local station that had a mono to stereo synth box wired in for automatic use. "Automatic" meant when it detected a mono signal, it went to the synth mode. So whenever a stereo or stereo/surround matrix encoded feature had mono content for more than five seconds (say .. someone talking with no music) then the fake stereo synth unit would kick in. As soon as any stereo music or effects came back, the dialog would snap back to the center. It sounded bad when listening in stereo, and was outright horrible when decoded via Dolby Surround.

But to tie back in with the STNG thread, in the early 90's when setting up STNG episodes to air at a local television station, after the color bars, when the Paramount episode # was displayed with additional slate information, you could hear Worf doing a Dolby Surround channel identification; "Left, right, center, surround". At the time, I thought it was pretty cool. IIRC, for Deep Space Nine slates, it was Odo doing the channel ID check.

Did anybody else get a good laugh at the stunt doubles? Obviously they weren't thinking about the BD release as it was originally produced for TV 25 years ago. They stand out, but not quite as bad as the stunt doubles in TOS.
Other than the audio issues we've discussed here, I think they've done a very nice job with the restoration.

You'd be very wrong.

Audio compression is used everywhere, all down the chain and sometimes right up until it hits your TV.

The real question is, how well is it being done. As pointed out in the post directly below yours, audio compression can be done invisibly and often is. Bad compression will jump out at you.

A good example is with some baseball coverage where you hear the audio snap down at the bat crack, then swoop back up again. That's usally a result of too much compression being used, which is far different than creeping back on the faser in anticipation of the hit, then manually riding the crowd levels to keep the cheering in check.

Audio compression happens independent of the content no matter where it comes from. The final mix from the board before it heads to the transmitter is what matters - and just about every professional control room audio board has compression capabilities in it. How overused it is becomes another matter.

So has anyone received the replacement disks yet?

I haven't.

I thought the message about the updates was... "we will start sending updated discs within 5 days of August 10th"... and with it just now August 16th, even IF they are on the schedule they said... that would mean they just started mailing things now... so I'd be surprised if anyone has replacements until next week at the earliest.

That needs to be some sort of audio calibration bonus feature on future season sets.

+1 to that.