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Dolby's TrueHD 96K Upsampling To Improve Sound On Blu-Rays
Stowie101 writes in with a story about your Blu-ray audio getting better. "The audio on most Blu-ray discs is sampled at 48kHz. Even the original movie tracks are usually only recorded at 48kHz, so once a movie migrates to disc, there isn't much that can be done. Dolby's new system upsamples that audio signal to 96kHz at the master stage prior to the Dolby TrueHD encoding, so you get lossless audio with fewer digital artifacts. The 'fewer digital artifacts' part comes from a feature of Dolby's upsampling process called de-apodizing, which corrects a prevalent digital artifact known as pre-ringing. Pre-ringing is often introduced in the capture and creation process and adds a digital harshness to the audio. The apodizing filter masks the effect of pre-ringing by placing it behind the source tone — the listener can't hear the pre-ringing because it's behind the more prevalent original signal."
May I be the first to say this- fuck Bluray, and fuck Cinavia.
I used to buy Bluray disks. Hell, I own a whole shelf full of them (about 80 titles in total). Every single one eventually got ripped to my NAS in two formats- a relatively lossless MKV file containing the original video and audio streams (up to DTS-HD MA), and a lossy x264 version for playing on crappy devices like the PS3 or 360.
Then Cinavia rolled around, which did two things:
1) It purposefully corrupts the audio stream in an attempt to encode digital information into it (go read their patents- the harder you try to pry Cinavia into an audio stream, the more damage is done to the original quality)
2) It prevented me from playing my legally purchased and legally ripped (it's legal in my country to rip disks and things you BUY) disks off my NAS on my PS3
What pisses me off the most though is that Sony is pushing Cinavia on everyone as hard as they can. AFAIK all new BR players need to be equipped with it, and most of the new BR disks are supposed to have it as well. And they're still advertising the disks as "Lossless", when in fact the audio is NOT lossless- it's lossy, the degradation of which is brought about solely by Cinavia's presence.
Before anyone yells [citation needed] at me, here's your proof straight from the Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia):
"Cinavia's in-band signaling introduces intentional spread spectrum phase distortion in the frequency domain of each individual audio channel separately, giving a per-channel digital signal that can yield up to 20 kilobits per second—depending on the quantization level available, and the desired trade-off between the required robustness and acceptable levels of psychoacoustic visibility. It is intended to survive analogue distortions such as the wow and flutter and amplitude modulation from magnetic tape sound recording. On playback no additional audio filters are used to cover up the distortions and discontinuities introduced."
So there you have it. Lossless is no longer lossless, because Sony insists on using this stupid fucking DRM on their stupid fucking format (as usual). Dolby's new gimmicky technology might claim to give you better lossless audio, but none of that matters the moment they drive Cinavia into the stream.
-AC
Question: Was 44.1 kHz chosen in part because the integer 44100 is highly composite? It's divisible by the following factors up to its square root: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 18, 20, 21, 25, 28, 30, 35, 36, 42, 45, 49, 50, 60, 63, 70, 75, 84, 90, 98, 100, 105, 126, 140, 147, 150, 175, 180, 196, 210.
Especially interesting is that it's divisible by 7.
Prime factorization of 44100 is 2^2 x 3^2 x 5^2 x 7^2, or (2x3x5x7)^2, or just 210^2. Pretty cool, huh? Coincidence or by design?