Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Tweak, stupid or not.

That is truly scary.

Ever join one of those CD clubs and compare the heft and thickness of one of their CDs versus a pressing from the label? My KISS Greatest Hits is nearly half again as thick as my fiancee's from CDHQ... and hers skips in a few places on my H-K 5 disc changer.

10 really thin CDs for a penny... yes PLEASE!

Never underestimate the corporate will to squeeze a nickel 'til it flatulates pennies. Or for consumer laziness to ruin a good concept (ie: DVDs are mostly single sided (4.7 GB) now... the image quality on a double sided DVD (9.4 GB) was a lot better... but you had to read the hub imprint to find out what DVD you had in)... so now we're stuck with pretty inking on one side and picture quality with crawling blacks and noticable MPEG compression.

Starting to wonder if I could find a place that rents movies on DigiBeta. *sigh*

Bren R.

BrenR,

A corporation's drive to give Joe Average Consumer what he wants will always leave those of us who notice what is left out disappointed. Our perception is a curse, I tell you!

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A corporation's drive to give Joe Average Consumer what he wants will always leave those of us who notice what is left out disappointed. Our perception is a curse, I tell you!

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Crunched some numbers here...

We know that CD Audio is uncompressed (1:1)... 747MB or so for 74 mins:
44100 x 2 channels x 2 (16 bit) x 60 secs/min x 74 mins) = 783,216,000 bytes
783,216,000 bytes / 1024 = 764859 KB
712,828 KB / 1024 = 747 MB

Whereas if a DVD of the same length was to be uncompressed, it would require (for the video bitstream only):
720 w x 486 h x 3 channels (YUV) x 29.97 fps x 60 x 74 = 139,688,203,968 bytes (130GB)... add a multichannel audio track in, and assume that there are VERY few 74 minute movies, and you see just HOW much video has been compressed to fit on a 4.7GB DVD, over 30:1...

I will admit that very few video formats are 4:4:4 colour space (DV is 4:1:1, BetaSX is 4:2:2) but for illustration purposes - this is the "high-quality" format we're buying $10,000 televisions to watch?

Bren R.

Not only that, but a significant amount of space on optical media is set aside for read error correction-- which is all to the good, but some of that space is counted by DVD manufacturers as data space.

(I'm not sure if the hard drive manufacturer practice of counting a gigabyte as 1000000000 bytes rather than 1073741824 bytes is followed by DVD folks, but it's possible, which would add up as well)

So... it might be a bit worse than that.

Arent there instruments for detecting changes in frequency/sonic qualities besides the human ear? I would
think these would be more unbiased than an ear. Also sense of touch , sight and hearing are all working at the same time. Heck, even emotions can affect the way you are hearing things.YOu cannot turn off your other senses while listening, so this immediately biases a test from a human ear.
Why cant they just measure changes with test instruments and see if they come in the audible range of the human ear.
This seems the only way to settle the "tweaking" discussion.

If listening to sounds or music is more than just an "ear" thing, well then I wouldnt know. Who knows, maybe our skin picks up up certain information when listening to music which adds to the whole experience. How about some flower scented Hendrix?

You really like stirring the pot, don't you? Go ahead, dig up a break-in thread next. ;-)

Well my highschool English teacher, Mrs. Hale I believe, did refer to me as "the stick that stirs the manure".

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Why cant they just measure changes with test instruments and see if they come in the audible range of the human ear.

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Much the same reason you couldn't write a computer program to evaluate art.

Though a meter with a FUBAR-like scale from "Suck" to "Good" would be worth the laugh.