Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Will there be any 7.1 true hd or DDhd hd dvd's

I am wondering if there will ever be any 7.1 lossless hd dvds or blue Rays in the near future if any at all. All of the research I do points to only 5.1 audio. The reason I ask is that I just bought two more surrounds for my theater for this prospect, but the more I look around I only see blue ray and hd dvds with just 5.1 What's the deal? Can anyone give me some insight into this problem? I keep seeing "up too 7.1 audio", but no mentioning of this actually occuring on any dvds. I have not yet bought an Hd Dvd or blue ray #1 because they are expensive, but mostly becuase none have hdmi 1.3 and I will need another reciever to for this later down the road, but can anyone tell me if blue ray or hd dvd is planing on using 7.1 or should I just have keep my 5.1 setup?

Even 5.1 encoded movies should sound better with a 7.1 speaker/receiver combo. The reason is that you get a much larger surround sound field to really put you into the middle of the action. Of course, this is coming from a guy with a 5.1 setup, but mine is due to space limitations. If I could, I would have gone 7.1.

I'm sure that 7.1 will eventually show up, there are also some good movies out now with 6.1 in DTS.

I am concerned about this because of the failure of sacd and dvd audio. People seem to be happy with crappy mp3 sound and I wonder if the studios will actually do this. Is there anyone out there who has evidence of this coming to pass? Alan??? anyone???? has anybody seen or heard of future disks being created in these formats? I would think that a 5.1 lossless with two back that are not would not sound right? Am I just making this up or not? Would it detract from the experience or still be worth while to use the back speakers? I keep hearing about how awesome the sound is with these new codecs and I am excited to hear them whenever I get the funds to do this, but I would be kinda bummed if the disks are not using their full capabilites (7 full lossless chanells of audio.)Does anyone know where I could go to get the truth from the horses mouth? Thanks, It would be greatly appreciated

Not meaning to stray from the topic, but it DOES amaze me that people think that MP3 audio is "so good". It is good. Good at being a compressed format, that is. Like satellite radio. Talk about a throwback to sounding like AM radio. There are receiver (and stereo) manufacturers that allow for compensation for compressed audio, but it is just "making it up" as it goes. A lot better than regular compressed audio, but still not the same as lossless. Which is also like regular definition DVDs on an upconverting DVD player. It is a lot better (in my opinion on my 104" HDTV projector) than non-upconverted, but still not the same as film quality or even hi-def.

They just announced the first 50 GB Blu-Ray movie is comeing out, of course the space will be for hi-def extras, and no better picture or sound, but at least it using the space, and people will start to put higher quality audio in more channels at some point.

When I read the Sony press release about the new BluRay titles one of the points was that they would be using uncompressed PCM audio.

Hi Jhunt17,

It's too early in the game to expect movie releases to be mixed in a multichannel lossless format. Dolby Digital 5.1 is a worldwide standard and will remain so until the quagmire of Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is settled.

It costs plenty in extra time with the mixing engineers to add additional discreet channels as well as adapt the mixing studios to operate in new Dolby formats.

This also gets into a philosophical question of how small nuances in audio improvement may come at too great a cost in the production budget of movies. Put another way, Dolby Digital 5.1 is an extremely transparent, albeit, "lossy" format. My experience testing lossy algorithms vs lossless formats is such that it takes concentrated listening on high-quality earphones with very particular groups of instruments or vocals to detect any difference between the most transparent lossy formats and their lossless equivalents.

As you know, DVD-Audio and SACD can sound wonderful, but it's clear that the slight audible improvements offered by those formats were not sufficient to persuade consumers to adopt them.

So part of me believes that discreet 8-channel lossless soundtracks will come eventually, but don't hold your breath for immediate changes.

Thanks Alan, from what I was looking at that is what I was begining to figure. I hope that they do come around with these, but I am not going to hold my breath. Is there anyone out there with a blue ray or hd dvd player that has heard the tracks and can give an idea of the difference in sound between dolby true hd and the regular 5.1 dolby digital?

Jack, I have to agree with you 100%, to me, going from regular cd's to SACD is like going from regular TV to HDTV. I'm baffled as to why SACD and DVDA's have not gained more popularity.