HD Advisor October 16, 2009

[Attebery]

It's Friday! You know what that means!

http://www.highdefdigest.com/news/sh...D_Advisor/3580

[The_10000th_Steve]

Words cannot describe how much I hate dyed-in-the-wool audio/videophiles and their Monster Cables.

[Hastor]

About Homework:

You should be able to use any powered PC speakers with the red/white RCA outputs. Just get a cheap adapter from radio shack to convert the RCA connectors into a stereo headphone style jack that the speakers can connect to. The signal is the same, the jacks are just different. The Xbox360's VGA adapter even comes with such an adapter, meaning that converting RCA jacks to PC speakers should be no problem at all. I've personally used this method many times.

[DrMaustus]

Anyone know off hand if the Onkyo 705 can do the full 192 Akira track?

[AndersT2]

On the Power cord and clean power question.

I totally agree with the answer for the most parts, many will believe (placebo) that their expensice powercords actually does something to justify the price.

What most of them don't think of is that when the power hit the equipment, they go thru a transformer than componments to make it into DC current (don't remember what this is called in english). This to make the power into something the equipment can use. And the manufacturer will in this stage make the current as DC as it need. More expensive equipment do this better than cheep. So if there should be a clean power in, cheap equipment would benefit the most.

But the only thing good there can come from changing the original powercord is magnetic interaction. Since we here in Europe uses 400V and 230V we are more sensitive to this. So a shielded powercord would be good to have. Not for the power inside the cable, but for all other cables that comes out of the equipment.

This is mostly for the analog cables, where a magnetic field can make the audio signal different. I myself had a buzzing sound in my surround back speakers, and this was from this problem. I moved the sockets from the speaker cabels and the problem went away.

[AndersT2]

On Lossless video.

First I would like to say that I believe there will be another physical movie disc in the future. But not on the large scale of DVD and Blu-ray. The next format will be for the entusiast, like LaserDisc was in the 90s. This will have 4K or 8K resolution with up to 14 channels of Lossless audio. But not lossless video.

Most people are happy with 1080p, and the common man will get, and be happy, with their over compressed downloads. But not the big hifi nuts like me



I would not compare lossless vs lossy audio, to the lossy vs lossless video. Because to compress audio you do remove something that can never be replaced. The compression on video works a little bit different. This explaination is what I remeber how compression on DVD works, I bet the BD works in some of the same way.

A movie have 24 pictures a second (DVD 50 or 60 dending on NTSC or PAL). On DVD when you have a pixle (not really, but easier to explain with) when this pixle is black (Or any other color), the compression works like this.

If the following pixle is the same color, they don't save it. They put a new color insert every 15 frame, or if the color changes. So if a screen is totally black, they only have to store every 15 frame, so for a 60 Hz (NTSC) signal they already have saved 1/4 of the space).

Without knowing, so to compress even more, they might not put in a new frame every time the color in the pixle changes. They might wait til it have changed a few % off the original color. This will make a worse picture. Specially if the picture is a mist, where the whole screen is different shades of grey. (Just watch the beginning of "Hellboy", or "The Ring" where there is a landscape picture of the misty island (When she meets Brian Cox))

On Blu-ray I would believe it works much in the same way, but having more pixels and more space, the end result is better. But it all comes down to the raw master they use.

[damonous]

Originally Posted by Q

Q: I just bought a new HDTV for the living room. ...The picture is great, but the sound is tinny and awful. The speakers are far worse than the 20 year-old SDTV this set has replaced. Adding surround sound, even from HTIB speakers, is out of the question. My wife won't have speakers and wires running everywhere, and I have no room for a receiver. I've looked into soundbars, but haven't seen anything I liked. Again, a large bulky soundbar is something my wife won't approve. I was thinking of using a pair of small powered computer/multi-media speakers. Even if they don't give me full-range dynamics, they can't be any worse than what's built into this TV. However, most I've seen will only work with a computer. Are there any suitable for using with the analog L/R or Toslink output from this TV? (My wife needs to be able to control the volume using the regular TV remote.)

Hastor's response to you, above, is correct: using a stereo-miniplug-to-RCA adapter (and probably a female-to-female miniplug coupler, too), you should be able to get sound into any of the computer speakers. I do that for PS3's I use for LAN parties. I remember when RCA audio-out from CE stuff was not high enough gain to drive the miniplug input, but that appears to have changed in recent years.

However, just because you can, doesn't mean you should. You haven't told us what model of TV this is with the "tinny and awful" sound, but I sincerely doubt that you will find small PC speakers (without a mini-sub & more wires) that will equal a TV's built-in speakers. I say this primarily because TV speakers (even crappy ones) have 1 big advantage over those small PC speakers: the cabinet of the TV. Sure, this could contribute to the cause of the 'tin sound', but it's also likely to make them sound a lot larger than they really are (acting as a 'bass tube' of sorts).

But, if you're absolutely convinced that (instead of getting a good soundbar) the way to go are some cheezeball PC speakers which are not likely to be aesthetically cohesive with your TV .... then I would recommend Logitech. They have generally contemporary looks and decent sound. --Just buy from somewhere that's going to return them without a hassle, if it doesn't work out for you.
http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/sp...kers/&cl=us,en
(I use the LS11's with PS3, which are cheap but good for their size, although it looks like the V20's would be better-matched to a TV: just make sure they also take audio in via line, not just USB.)



One last VERY IMPORTANT thing (your last requirement): if your TV's RCA audio-out is not variable-out, then the aforementioned trick is NOT going to work for you via the TV's remote control. You would only be able to control audio from the PC speakers' built-in controls. Not all TV's have variable audio-out. And, I don't think ANY provide variable audio-out via optical.

[Biggiesized]

Josh, you need to edit that section on video compression.

H.264 most certainly has a lossless coding mode and x264 already supports it!

[vinnie97]

^The filesizes of such encodes must reflect your usename.

[Biggiesized]

They're still smaller than uncompressed video.

[singhcr]

One mistake about the Akira question:

There is a 2.0 PCM Japanese track also included on the disc that is not 192/24, you could use that if you did not want to mess around with your audio settings.

[vinnie97]

Originally Posted by Biggiesized

They're still smaller than uncompressed video.

But of course, I was only making a poor joke. I wonder what compression ratios lossless H.264 encodes achieve on average.

[holsty101]

I bought my dad one a few years ago to use on his cd player (Meridians "entry level" machine at the time ... still cost 1000gbp), which he uses with an equally lavish pair of headphones (350gbp secondhand ()), and the difference it made, while admittedly subtle, was emphatically there. We did some blind tests (for him of course, I knew if it was/not being used) over an evening with a variety of cds and he -always- got the answer right. (Personally I found the difference harder to make out with with synthesised music, anything played with real instruments showed the difference clearer for me)

Now this was a (to my mind) expensive little bit kit, 220gbp IIRC for a single outlet (and wouldn't you know it, they updated it under a year later to a double outlet <sigh>, would've been nice to have the headphone amp going through it too I think) but he was very pleased with it, to the extent that he wanted to keep the shops demo unit rather than wait the week it took for them to get a new one in stock.

Maybe the difference would be less obvious on cheaper equipment, all I know is, since that night I've known for sure what difference a quality mains conditioner can make, and that when I get around to building my own hi-fi/HT I'll definitely be investigating the companies (not Monster though ) this side of the Atlantic that make them.

[iamgosu]

For the homework question:

I do what the people above have said to my 32" Sharp HDTV.

I bought a set of these speakers:
http://www.techenclave.com/reviews-a...30-110317.html

And a cheap RCA / 3.5mm adapter off monoprice.com

They work really well, they costed me 60$ CAD + tax off NCIX (which doesn't carry them anymore, unfortunately)

If you want to up it a bit, these Edifiers are amazing:

http://www.ncix.com/products/?sku=27...acture=EDIFIER

But, one thing's for certain, these speakers are powerful enough to shake the room lol...

These are all Canadian retailers, so you'll have to look for similar retailers if you live in the States. And one thing to note is that all these speakers are 2.1 systems, so there's a sub, so it might be a problem with your wife.

[MG15]

Originally Posted by DrMaustus

Anyone know off hand if the Onkyo 705 can do the full 192 Akira track?

Under bitstream, no the 705 doesn't support a 192kHz TrueHD signal. The 705 does support a multichannel 192kHz PCM signal so you could have the ps3 do the decoding and listen to it that way.

Edit: The person who asked the question with the 804. Did you try to switch the 804 to the direct mode? The manual states that 192 playback is not supported in Multich listening mode, but is unclear if that is also Direct Mode.