Things that make you go Hmmm. Laserdisc Versus HDM - Page 9

So just curious is there an easy way on a computer to convert DTS-6 CD-ROMS to PCM files? I know I can use the DTS6D to decode them and record the output. Any way to do it in the digital domain?

No, there isn't - well, actually, I'm not sure - I have the DTS Recorder software for the DTS-P8 recorder - you probably know what that is, but if not, it's the recorder used to encode the source audio into 4:1 compressed APT-X100 and then multiplex it and record it onto a master CD-ROM. It might be able to demultiplex the files - and APT-X100 coder is now available in software. I have probably 300 or more DTS-6 discs plus maybe 400 DTS Trailer discs. I'd love to be able to turn them into PCM files and re-encode them to Coherent Acoustics.

I have an 8-channel APT-X100 PCI card from a DTS-P8 mastering unit - it has four APT-X100 chips that do both encoding and decoding - you can have it if you want it - and I'll email you the P8 .exe file if you want to play around with it. It's just a simple DOS program.

BTW, APT-X100 was one of the first 'advanced' low-bitrate systems, wasn't it? I recall that Stereophile talked about it in their "Industry Update" one time and also discussed the paper presented at that years AES convention by the APT-X100 systems' designer - Mike Smyth, I think it was - they trashed him unmercifully for using specifications, measurements and ABX testing to design it - and not just going with "what his ears and emotions told him". To me, it seems like the digital 'equivalent' of Dolby A-Type Noise Reduction - not in what it does, but that it was an early system that worked well and found wide usage. And it's a 4-band system like Dolby too! DTS originally used APT-X100 to demo six channel "DTS CD's" to Gary Reber and others... I think there might also be an early DTS demo LaserDisc made with six tracks of APT-X in the place of the digital 2-channel PCM tracks. I'd LOVE to find that! In DTS' 'channel mapping' patent for formatting lossy audio data onto a standard CD audio disc, the APT-X100 coder is used as the main example. DTS hadn't found the ARTEC system yet.

That's a very nice decoder. I'd *guess* (only guess) it's a second gen. I think the 1st gen decoders came only in sizes of electronic control cabinets. Classification of decoders into "generations" is not easy. One method to classify them is the integration level of electronic components. If you take a look at the decoders innards you will notice that the late models (HV-MD2, MD-CZ11, TU-MDC100) are much higher integrated. Some sources classify them as 4th gen. The MSC-4000 is known as 3rd-gen. I've put my HM-D101 into the 2nd-gen category, but this is solely based on the year of market introduction.

Yes.
(Sony-fans pls forgive me)

All the layers of boards in that decoder are very large... 12 inch x 8 inch long boards or so. lots of huge chips, IC and lots of pcb area are taken up by memory banks. I have not opened it in a while, I have a pic somewhere. heck that decoder is heavier than many average av amps. longer than most shelves can accommodate, that's why I put the unit on the top shelves.

I wonder how much data could be fit on LD with a blue laser using the same track configuration as Blu-Ray I'd bet on the order of 100's of TB!

Pioneer and Sanyo were working on methods such as that back in the day - MPEG-2 or similar coding schemes, were used and many, many hours were achieved.

Mitsubishi achieved three hours of full-bandwidth (not MUSE) Hi-Vision on a single disc side using a green 'super resolution' laser.

I would imagine, with Blu-ray-type pits and a blue-violet laser, that the disc would be capable of incredible performance... if they could press good copies. The LD was an incredibly difficult thing to make - even with the large size pits they were using then - it has so much surface area that contamination is quite easy and high yields are not a simple thing to achieve. That's why the industry was so quick to go to a smaller size disc - it had less surface area to contaminate during manufacture. Plus, the 12-inch disc is so large that all kinds of problems with plastic flow and stuff come into play and the disc degrades easily - with the much smaller pits, the problems would be even worse. The Japanese could probably solve all of them though.

I wish Pioneer had introduced the backwards compatible "Super LaserDisc's" - they were planning to in the late 80's... the analog audio carriers would be dropped and full 6-MHz bandwidth video used. The discs would have the CD audio tracks, of course... and since the carrier frequencies and FM deviation were to be the same as the standard disc, older players could play the "Super" discs with standard LD resolution. Pioneer was also planning, in the mid 80's, to add two more analog FM channels to the disc system - the additional channels were piggybacked onto the existing FM carriers like FM stereo radio does. The discs were going to use the Universal SQ (USQ) system to ensure backwards compatibility - the main FM channels would be encoded with the SQ Matrix and the additional FM channels would carry the SQ 'crosstalk' components - so if you didn't have a new player, you got 2 channel SQ or could decode it to 4-channel matrix SQ - if you had a new player, the channels would be added and subtracted to yeild the original, discrete, 4-channel signals.

This book everyone is talking about, is it by Joel Brinkley?

I seem to recall that Sanyo had an HiVision HDVS LD type system as well. What are the differences between the Sony HDL2000 system?

The book which we're talking about is: "High Definition Television: Hi-Vision Technology" by NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories (1993). It was written by the inventors of the Muse system.


I don't know much about those systems, but I remember when I made some enquiries about HD systems I was told that those two are incompatible.

Another of them, I remember, was Chicago 17. It had two videos as well, I think. I remember I did not buy it because it had the videos I didn't want (A Hard Habit To Break, You're The Inspiration) and not the ones I did want (Along Comes A Woman and especially Stay The Night).

I still have 11 CD Video discs in my collection, not counting discs from when Philips briefly used the term "CD Video" to mean regular 12" Laser Discs.

of all the laserdisc titles the one i miss the most was THE KEEP sorry if its a bit off
topic had to get that off my chest.

What kind of display is best for Laserdisc, CRT, LCD, Plasma, etc? I now have a Sony RP LCD model # KDF50WE655, that I am not very pleased with, the blacks and shadows do not have enough detail for my liking. Any help would be appreciated.

as long as they are calibrated properly as per ISF standard, they will be as good.

I don't have much to add, but I do want to say that this is a fascinating thread.
I missed out on the LaserDisc era but do recall a friend of mine having a setup and being blown away by the quality over the standard VHS format that I was used to back then.

I guess that depends on how one defines 'burner'. I believe some of Toshibas laptops can burn HD DVD discs. And DVD Studio Pro 4 (for the Mac) allows one to burn to the HD DVD spec, albeit on regular DVD-R.

I still have my LD player and use every now-and-then. I have the last best unaltered version of the "Star Wars" movies.

Check out http://www.cedmagic.com
All about the selectavision format.

The best type of display for LD should be the same criteria used for any viewing. If talking about LD specific then scaling, de-interlacing, and comb filter would be the most LD important. The type and brand of display is a personal preference and each technology has its pluses and minuses.

Same here, can't part with the 3 LDs, they are THX encoded, plus they have the "bonus" interview with George.


Interesting thread - interesting numbers.

Still have my discs in the attic, and I have to "bump" my player to get it to
flip sides. Though we did watch "Hunt For Red October" a month ago on our Projector's S-video input. Didn't look bad, but made me glad for HDM discs.
Don
---
format neutral

you mean THX certified right? There is no THX encoded disc at all since THX is not a sound format.

Yeah yeah.
Dolby Pro Logic.

can't believe I missed this discussion...

Anyway, TK, your MST1000 is a first generation decoder. Quite frankly, I owned all of the decoders from Sony (as well as JVC), and I noticed no performance difference between the 1000 and the later 4000. The 1000 is certainly built like a reference piece, where as the 4000 is smaller, cheaper, lighter, etc.

As for Sony Hi-Vision players, they were a bit flaky, but the picture they put out over MUSE was on par (IMO) with the X9. I owned the HIL-C1, the HIL-C2, the Pioneer X9, and the Pioneer X0.

Movie quality, the explanation from Disclord explains a bit about the transfer process, and Top Gun is a great example (it's unwatchable - it's too dark). Jurassic Park, I did side by side comparisons of the MUSE vs DVD, and I'd say that the DVD having more compression artifacts, still looked better than the MUSE disc. MUSE movies never held up well in dark scenes, and fleshtones often had a 'green' tinge to them. Funny enough, that green tinge appeared on all decoders/players I had EXCEPT when played on the X0 - it was either gone or minimized significantly.

The audio on MUSE discs is also interesting. Movies often were encoded in the "A" format, which had 4 independent channels (left, center, right, mono surround). No company (I'm aware of) ever built a receiver in Japan to accept and decode two optical digital audio inputs simultaneously, so you'd either set up two receivers (each one decoding one channel), or have the decoder send it out analog. Audio was 32KHz in A-Channel. Discs with A-Channel often (99%) times also had a 2 channel, Dolby encoded PCM track. I think "Tahiti" is the only A-channel disc to not have a PCM track.

Then there was the "B" channel, which was 48KHz, 2 channel, sometimes encoded with Dolby.

I miss MUSE, and will soon archive (by capturing) the scenery discs and encode them in MPEG2.

here's some old pic of the top board...

I've read that about the X0 not having the green tinge and think it has to have something to do with the TBC in the player or some kind of final filtering to the analog MUSE output - maybe less jitter on the X0? That would affect the sampling in the MUSE decoder's AD section - less aliasing too maybe? It just seems weird that an artifact like that was allowed to remain - what about satellite MUSE broadcasts? Did they ever have weird artifacts like the 'green' or does anyone know?

Make sure the comb-filter gives you full-bandwidth Chroma decoding - most don't. For viewing LD's from my LD-1100 and DVL-700 I use the comb filter in the Panasonic DMR-20 DVD-RAM recorder. It combs 1.5 MHz of chroma - since LD is a full bandwidth signal, you don't want the nasty "50 line" comb filters that are common in a lot of equipment (and PC's!). Most of the later Kurary made LD's (like the DTS LD's) were encoded to NTSC using the Faroudja SuperNTSC encoder and so have a very wide chroma bandwidth... I 'think' the Faroudja was also used by Mitsubishi with the Star Wars Definitive Collection - my copy is the original "defective" pressing that's missing 7 seconds from Empire...

Did Mitsubishi press the re-issues of that Definitive? Or did Pioneer or someone else do it? I've never read who did the fixed pressings.

You know, the AC-3 LD pressing of ALIEN should be a collectors item - it contains the 70mm six-track mix that used the wrong score for a lot of the film - the DVD's are all from the 'corrected' multi-channel mixes. Plus, the ALIEN AC-3 LD has incredible bass.

I've been thinking about dubbing the DTS LD's to CD-R - 1-side, 1-disc - to manually sync to the DVD's of the various titles...

I have found that analog CRT works best w/ laserdisc. I keep a 1998 36" Sony Wega CRT around just for viewing my Laserdisc collection. They look simply Gorgeous on it (vs. my 50" Sony LCD) . And VHS don't look half bad on it either.

Thanks for the in-depth view on the format. As far as decoders are concerned: have you ever had the chance to test the Panasonic TU-MDC100? I think from all decoders I own/have seen this one produces the best picture quality and significantly brighter colors.

And yes: I don't know what kind of magic is built into the X0 that it doesn't produce the greenish tint on HiVision LDs.

Allow me a question out of curiosity: what does your signature mean ("I buried the format finally") if on the other hand your saying you miss Muse?

I have a 32'' CRT HD-TV (JVC HV32P40), which is perfect for analog SD and HD signals. The TV supports up to 1080i/50 and 60Hz, and 1035i/60 as well (for Muse HiVision sources). I wanted to have a native interlaced TV (CRT) as a perfect match for my ever growing laserdisc collection.

Sadly this is one of these hardest decoders (along with the Pioneer HM-D101) to obtain, so I never did get a chance to test it. I'm sure it produces a nice picture.



It means exactly what it says: I buried that format and am no longer collecting MUSE LDs (my signature used to advertise I was looking for MUSE LDs)

I used to be a big MUSE LD collector, I've had basically every disc (and then some) for the format with the exception of all the NEC Fish Club discs (and many of those aren't even shot true HD, but Betacam upconverted). But with the advent of digital HD, there was no reason to hold onto the MUSE equipment, so I sold it when I could still get top dollar.

I said I'd never part with it as long as "Fish Face Exhibition" was unavailable in digital HD. That finally became available in 2004 from both Japan on the BS network, as well as locally on InHD, where it and many MUSE discs were shown (the broadcast versions, not the MUSE encoded discs themselves). Fish Face Exhibition, Alaska, Hills of the Season, Dolphin Story, Coral Story, Sea Forest, and Sea of Ohktosk have all been shown (and subsequently recorded).

There were two MUSE LD Scenery discs I never had or have ever watched because they were impossible to find: New York, and Monument Valley. Those I'd still like to see.

I also had an HDL-2000 (non MUSE) deck, and only one disc. I could get more discs, but at $9,000 a pop (included broadcast rights), well, it didn't make financial sense. There was also a handful of 3-D discs (required two players/discs) as well I'd love to see, including "Tahiti" which is also a MUSE LD disc.

Someday I'll put together a web page to chronicle MUSE LD, along with all the catalogs, literature, etc.

Thanks tteich and John Balentine for your input. I had a RP CRT before I got the RP LCD and I like it better for Laser Disc than the LCD. I guess you can't beat a good CRT.