AudioBanter.com - View Single Post - DBT in audio

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 19:58:25 GMT, (Don Pearce)
wrote:

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 13:52:44 -0600, dave weil
wrote:

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 17:55:21 GMT, (Don Pearce)
wrote:

On Mon, 16 Jan 2006 18:44:57 +0100, Sander deWaal
wrote:

(Don Pearce) said:

No you don't. I have a tendency to doubt myself - which is why I don't
fall for the nonsense my senses frequently throw at me.

Do you watch movies, or TV?
Does the fact that there are 24 or 30 separate images per second ,
bother you while watching the news? :-)

Not here in England, it doesn't :-)

I can certainly say that the current digital compression schemes being
use in satellite transmission and storage here in the US bothers ME.
Especially bothersome is the apparent heavy-handed compression schemes
being used by some US networks, and/or transmission systems, which
results in banding, "melting" and other obvious visual anomolies. When
I watch current West Wing episodes on Dish Network, I see shifting
faces (the different patches of skin color don't seem to refresh at
quite the same rate, causing an odd melty quality to closeups) and
when there's low lighting in a room, there's obvious banding of color
gradiations on the wall (or the same in blue skies). It seems to be
content dependent because some sources are better than others. NBC
seems to use extreme measures to store their content.

Also, live sports events are sometimes troublesome. When i watch
American football, the turf is quite "stitched" looking. You can see
regular "patches" that look discontinuous.

I hope that HD takes care of some of this. Univeral HD is still pretty
far away though. I WOULD like to see greater bandwidth pretty soon.

I was really referring to the fact that the frequencies in England are
different. :-)

Oh, I know. I was just ranting...

As for HD - it is going to be worse. No broadcaster is going to spend
the kind of bandwidth necessary for high quality transmission of HD.
There may be areas of screen with nice fine detail, but the rest will
be a disgusting mess of MPEG artifacts - much worse than today on
standard definition. Forget what you have seen so far on the demos -
that doesn't reflect future reality.

That's sad. Here's an example of digital messing everything up. Maybe
the vast majority of consumers will "put up with it" and I might too,
just to have the convenience of live pause and replay, but this is the
case of performance not meeting the potential. CD quality for MP3 at
the highest bitrates? Debatable, but at least it's debatable. The
current state of the video signal that I receive is mostly NOT
debatable when it comes to "DVD quality", or even VCR tape quality for
that matter (at least at the best settings). Not even close. Even a
dbt would settle that pretty quickly g.