AV Rant #285: With Tongue
It’s our 5 year anniversary (but we don’t mention that on the podcast). Hurray for us! Liz is back and this week we talk about the upcoming summer movies. Are you excited? We dissect the trailers for Spiderman, Dark Knight Rises, and Prometheus. Also, Mother’s Day is around the corner and we discuss the Audioholics gift guide and add a few of our own. Tom talks about his Sonomax eers Molded Earphone PSC-250 review (coming to Audioholics soon) and a bit more on the new Axiom speakers. Liz got her husband an Emotiva amp for his birthday. Now that is true love. After the break – some words on PCM from Clint. Oh, and here is that interview with Joss Whedon that everyone is talking about and that video of a lion trying to eat a child. Thanks for listening. Now, don't forget to:
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Here was the question:
Let me know if I have this wrong, but it’s my understanding that BluRay player decoding has two features: BluRay decoding and audio mixing. Thus, if you are listening to secondary audio sources (like director’s commentary) it is literally mixed in on the fly, so the only place to do it is in the player. True?
And Clint’s response:
The typical question usually has to do with the button sounds and the issue of LPCM vs. native TrueHD. The deal was, BD was designed to mix everything and output LPCM from the get-go. It wasn’t really made to output native Dolby TrueHD, DTS HD, etc… Thus, on earlier players, when you finally COULD output TrueHD via HDMI – so that your receiver could decode it – you missed the layer of button sounds, etc… it never made it into the mix because you were outputting the Dolby TrueHD “pre” mix.
As far as I am aware, newer, more advanced players now actually re-encode to include the Dolby TrueHD source plus the button overlay sounds into a Dolby TrueHD output. It’s sort of bass-ackwards but that’s what people said they wanted.
You could say that misguided audiophiles actually changed the course of Blu-ray by insisting on having uncompressed Dolby TrueHD output via the HDMI jack – where it was really never intended to be. Apparently uncompressed PCM is for losers. 😉
I just read your review of the Eeeers. I have gone through several sets of earphones because I wear them while I work washing windows and would share your scepticism of the breakin thing if it had to do with sound. I have found that it really is a few weeks before I don’t have to fiddle with the new phones to keep them fit in right. I would be interested in an update after a while. Are they staying seated better?
Jeb
The computer speakers she could not remember were the Klipsch Promedia 2.1 (you know….the ones that start with a “T”)
My custom earbuds are Etymotics hf5 which go for $99 to $149 depending on where you get them. The custom fit then costs about another $100. I fly a LOT (100+ flights last year) and these headphones were worth every penny!
Jeb,
I’ve had to move on to other headphones for other reviews as of late. I’ll return to them shortly and let you know. I do miss them after some of the other ones I’ve been using.