AHH-HA-HA-HA-HAAA! It has happened! I predicted it and it has happened!

I had to go all the way back to February’s podcasts to find these, but this is what I wrote:

EPISODE #115: Title Tease

Comments:

Rob on 12 February, 2009 at 3:12 pm:

— LOL! Pretty soon, I’ll have Dina and Tom so worried that that’ll end up saying “fewer” when they actually should use “less”! —

EPISODE #116: What’s her name

Comments:

Rob on 25 February, 2009 at 7:25 pm

— When talking about time, money or distance, using the word “less” instead of “fewer” is acceptable. —

And here we are, 2 July, 2009: Dina has “corrected” Tom into saying “60 seconds or fewer” when “60 seconds or less” was already correct!

Tickled pink, I is, says I. 😀

At least proper language usage is being given some thought, though, and that is all I ask 🙂

Now, if I could just get that pesky ‘t’ sound out of “often” 😉

We’re gonna miss Dina :_( Just isn’t the same without her.

We have to look at the bright side though, which is that more guest co-hosts get to take part now – I’m looking forward to hearing those!

Tom – Re: Bass in Blue Man Group

I HATE to mention it (Raul’s gonna yell at me :p ), but what are your bass management settings in your receiver/processor?

The PS3 is outputting PCM no matter what, and depending upon which bit/sampling rates you checked off in the PS3’s Sound Menu, you may be getting 96/24.

With most concerts, the bass is mixed into the Front L/R channels and not into the LFE channel and many receivers/processors will not perform proper bass management on 96/24 PCM signals.

It’s what I was talking about (it just won’t go away!), but it might be worth your while to try setting the Front L/R speakers to Large and setting the subwoofer output to “Double Bass”.

It MIGHT even be worth trying the speaker wire connection! (gasp!)

There could be “hidden” bass in those soundtracks, Tom! Lovely, “hidden”, chest-thumping bass that isn’t getting routed to your subwoofer!

We joked about it, Tom. We joked about it being silly to worry that people out there might not be hearing all the bass they are supposed to be hearing. But what if it is happening…

TO YOU ?????

lol

(seriously though…it’s worth checking 😉 )

Thanks, Tom, for your thoughts on the Diana Krall Live in Rio Blu Ray Disc. Your additional comments in the show notes match up with the other video quality comments I saw. I haven’t seen a concert video mixed that way, but I guess that’s how they do it in the movies–the audio cues match up with what you see on the screen. Thanks again for your thoughts on the disc.

Zigbee is a very low power wireless networking technology. The green battery-free standard will not be a matter of “efficiency”, this just won’t be designed to power high-energy devices like speaker amps. An amp just needs orders of magnitude more power than a zigbee sensor.

I kind of doubt that the energy density in the backround RF is enough to power an amp (even something class-D and extremely efficient). You would pretty much need active microwave emitters somewhere in your room to power a wireless amp.

“You would pretty much need active microwave emitters somewhere in your room to power a wireless amp”

Oh just wait.. somewhere there’s a guy in Arizona working on it… they’ll find his charred remains underneath a trailer one day and wonder what happened.

Want your PS3 to output bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio? Go to Settings/Video menu (yes, video) and under audio format or some such you can choose PCM or Bitstream. Of course, if you choose Bitstream the PS3 cannot mix in the the audio commentary tracks, PIP audio and those all important click/sounds when you move the cursor. 🙂

I’m afraid that is not the case, Nelson. If you adjust the settings as you described, the PS3 will output bitstream Dolby Digital or DTS, but it does not have the capability to output bitstream TrueHD or DTS-HD MA. This is a hardware limitation of the PS3 and not something that can be updated via firmware.

The only way to hear the full quality of HD Audio somdtracks is to let the PS3 handle the decoding. And that means setting the HDMI output to PCM 🙂

My appologies. I could have sworn I had this working at one point but I have been doing PCM since last summer when I got the new receiver.

It’s very, very easy to get confused with the whole bitstream vs. PCM thing! It happens all the time with stand-alone players too. For example, there was a Panasonic player that could output TrueHD and DTS-HD MA in bitsteam, but it had no internal decoders. The weird thing was, it had 7.1 analogue outputs! So naturally, people figured that if they were using the 7.1 analogue outputs, they were getting the highest quality audio. But in reality, that player was just decoding regular old Dolby Digital or DTS and then outputting that via the 7.1 analogue! Confusing as heck!

With the PS3, the easiest way to remember it is that if you are ever using bitstream from the PS3, then you are only getting regular old Dolby Digital or DTS. Whether you use bitstream from the HDMI output or bitstream from the Toslink output, it’s going to be limited to regular old DD or DTS from the PS3.

But the PS3 DOES have internal (software) decoders for TrueHD and DTS-HD MA, so it can handle the HD-Audio decoding internally. That allows it to output the full, highest quality audio, but only in PCM form 😉