"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message
...
In article , R. Mark Clayton
wrote:

SNIP

Odd. Does the difference persist when DVD's are played on your Blu Ray
player?

There will be some difference between 48hpbs per channel on DVD and
192kpbs per channel on Blu Ray, but without "golden ears" you will have
difficulty spotting it (unlike the picture quality).

I'm now curious about the above values (and units). Are "hpbs" and "kpbs"
typos? If so, did you mean "kbps"?

k obviously.


Also, where does the data come from that most DVDs are "48kbps per
channel"? The DVDs I record using standard home recorders generally use
256kbps or more for the stereo audio. But since most of the commercial
DVDs
I have are LPCM I don't know what is usual for commercial films.

Varies from 16bits 48kbps (slightly better than CD at 44k1bps) to much
higher (24bits @192k)


And going off at a tangent... I'd be interested in the details behind the
idea that the OPs brother can "tell speaker cables in blind tests". That
is
an assertion that has appeared countless times over the years and - in
correctly run tests - has never been established to my knowledge.

Indeed wouldn't mind a wager on this.


Only exceptions I'm aware of are when the cable either has so much series
impedance that when placed in the system it significantly alters the
frequency response, or causes a marginally stable amplifier to become
unstable. Both of these factors are well known. But all the other
quasi-magical assertions about speaker cables seem unsupported by
correctly
run test results.

Whilst it is worth having reasonably thick cables so that they don't get
warm and there are negligible losses on a long run, you are otherwise
unlikely to be able to be able to notice or measure any difference (apart
from fractions of a dB in volume, which can be compensated for).

snip

I wonder if your DVD player or amp was set up correctly to do 5.1 and
was perhaps instead doing stereo or some variation on Dolby Pro Logic?

Given measurements on other commercial audio products my main candidate
remains that the material is simply being level compressed in a different
way by the makers. This has been found even as a measurable difference on
the CDA and SACD layers of dual-layer discs. The industry assumption seems
to be that 'early adopters' want to hear and see something 'more
impressive' but as the system become 'mass market' the old faith in
'louder
is better' rules and things become clipped and crushed as the output is
dumbed down.

Dunno - nothing would surprise me especially from Sony.


Slainte,

Jim

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