Penteo demo DVD now available for download

I have now posted a .zip'd ISO of the 8/16/06 demo DVD. If you can download a 157MB file without too much grief, unzip it, and can burn a DVD from an .ISO file, you can have the entire DVD.

It's at http://www.penteosurround.com/ftp/Pe..._8-16-2006.zip

It will unzip into an .ISO file, which can be burned to a DVD using any DVD-burning software that supports ISO burning, complete with color bars and menu structure, and Dolby Digital 5.1 surround audio.

The audio and music content on this DVD is owned by its original copyright owners and is provided for audio processing quality evaluation only.

There are 5 full-length tracks. First one to name them all wins the prize of being able to claim they were first.

The 157MB is the size of the zip file, which unzips to a 700MB ISO before burning to about a 750MB DVD fileset. (It's that small because the video is only color bars with burned in timecode.)

I could have left out the timecode and made it even smaller....

No - these are from the original stereo mixes.. That's what Penteo is - it's my upmixing process that parses the stereo panorama into surround cleanly. What you're hearing is the original stereo panorama spread out cleanly amongst a surround panorama.

Look at your hand - take your fingers and spread them out as far as you can with the thumb and little finger at 90 degrees; --- that's the Stereo conversion to Penteo.

Thanks for your compliments.

Okay, I snuck that one in. Actually, it's my current favorite band/singer, a guy named Jordon Zadorozny and his former band Blinker the Star. We correspond a lot. I'm sure he'll appreciate the association. He now records out of his parent's basement in Ontario, Canada and has a new band named Abbey.

You're hearing Geoff Emerick's original mix (1969?). It wasn't recorded on a lot of tracks so it's pretty spread out when it's spread out. Also, the snare was panned hard right in the original stereo mix, so it winds up in the right rear !!!

It's actually listed on the DVD Menu

It's part of the stereo preparation for surround parse-out: I do three things: absolute azimuth correction, absolute NAB EQ correction (L/R), digital noise elimination and automated digital EQ normalization at 1/3 octave intervals. It's the same kind of thing that I would do if I were remastering any CD for stereo. If you A/B the stereo original to the stereo prepped master, it sounds 20 years newer.

We can do a lot more now than we could back when these CDs were first mastered.

Thanks for the compliment.

It depends entirely on how the original stereo mix was panned. All I'm doing is parsing the panorama. It's really just room-sized stereo.

Hey JorgeLuiz: Penteo isn't a product for sale (like a box or a piece of software), it's a mastering service that I intended to market to record companies and online services like Rhapsody and iTunes. Unfortunately, surround music is now somewhat out of favor as a revenue source, so I'm still trying to find or put together an online service or a packager to market Penteo discs and/or downloads.

Hopefully we'll find a way, soon.

Wow, thanks. Unfortunately, it's not an automatic process; a lot of work is done by hand, so it takes 1-2 hours to process a single song, depending on how much damage has been done by time and mastering errors.

I'll keep working on a legitimate marketing plan. Thanks again.

I actually dropped an email to their Program Director, who said "Telos is handling all that for us." I'm not quite sure what part of it is any surround upconversion.

As I said in an earlier thread, JorgeLuiz, the way it "sounds" usually has nothing to do with the format that it has been encoded in, it has to do with how well it was encoded. AC3 (and its forerunner AC2) is essentially transparent in its first generation, and professional listeners are hard-pressed (and usually can't tell which is which in controlled studies) to hear any difference between a master tape and the encoded output.

My demo uses no compression, -31db dialog normalization (which makes it as loud as any other format - not that low-level typical DD phenomenon) and no reduction or phase rotation in the rear channels, and no RF overmodulation protection. You have to go into the Dolby Digital encoding parameters very specifically to encode something that way, since it certainly isn't the "default" for Dolby Digital encoding. What I'm essentially using in is "raw" mode, since there's no compression or peak limiting in the software to prevent overload. You have to master it carefully, which is what audio mastering engineers are accustomed to. The audio peaks are actually at -.10 db (-1/10th of a db below all 1's).

Dolby Digital has a lot of built-in "protections" which work great on movies, but makes music encoding sound dull and less dynamic unless the normalization, compression, and protections are disabled. It's called "metadata hell". .

See http://www.dolby.com/assets/pdf/tech...data.Guide.pdf for an example of what I'm talking about.