5.1 Surround Sound Discs
ledvedderman
Posts: 7,761
So one of my favorite albums, and most underrated, How Does Your Garden Grow? by Better Than Ezra is being rereleased in a 5.1 format. I don't have surround sound at home and I notice it says DVD Player on the packaging. Do I have to play this through a DVD player or will it play in my car like a CD?
Post edited by Unknown User on
0
Comments
Typo Man: "Thanks kidz, but remembir, stay in skool!"
http://www.reverbnation.com/brianzilm
Typo Man: "Thanks kidz, but remembir, stay in skool!"
http://www.reverbnation.com/brianzilm
http://www.reverbnation.com/brianzilm
But it felt so good.
And your mother didn't mind,
Like I thought she would.
And that REM song was playing
In my mind.
And three and a half minutes
Felt like a lifetime.
Wrong album, but fuck yeah. What a great band.
http://www.reverbnation.com/brianzilm
Ha, whoops! :oops:
It really depends on what your focus is going to be. Most people use 5.1 only for movies, and that's fine. You can get away with a HTIAB (Home Theater In A Box) for a few hundred bucks and be generally pleased. Music discs that have 5.1 in Dolby or DTS will work on this kind of system.
But if you decide to get into Super Audio or DVD-Audio, that's a whole separate beast. I don't have the specs on the album you are getting. It may just be a DTS or Dolby, or at least have a Dolby or DTS layer, in which case your HTIAB would handle it fine. It seems like a lot of discs are coming out lately that are not hi-fi (SACD or DVD-A), so you may be ok like I said.
Typo Man: "Thanks kidz, but remembir, stay in skool!"
As to the question of how it will play--I would bet it will play on any DVD/Blu-ray player using the Dolby Digital or DTS spec. If I remember right, "DVD-Audio" is a specific audiophile format that can only play on specialty players (and generally couldn't be run through a single cable like Dolby or DTS--you needed six cables, one for each of the five channels and the one for the low end), but when they set it up, they made it an industry requirement that all DVD-Audio discs also had at least a Dolby Digital version encoded, so a standard DVD player could run it. Some also included DTS. There were some "dual discs" with no artwork printed on either side of the disc (like two-sided DVDs), where the CD version was on one side and the DVD-Audio/Dolby version was on the other. I have a couple of those--Springsteen's Devils and Dust and Miles Davis's Kind of Blue come to mind--and most of the R.E.M. albums were two-disc sets, with a CD and a DVD-A each included.
SACD was a separate format that also required its own player and the six-channel hookup, but a lot of the discs had a dual-layer pressing (on the same side of the disc), so a regular CD player could play the "standard-definition" CD-quality audio, while an SACD player could access the SACD audiophile layer. Sometimes the SACD focused on audiophile stereo quality (like the Peter Gabriel reissues), sometimes on surround sound (like Dark Side of the Moon). Some of the dual-layer CD/SACD albums I have include surround versions of Tommy, The Downward Spiral, and Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.
The format war (and difficulty explaining it to non-enthusiasts), combined with the simultaneous boom in compressed-quality mp3 music and people's lust for portability, meant surround music never really took off in the U.S. (though it did quite a bit better around the world, I think).
At one time, I had a Pioneer single-disc DVD player that could decode SACD and DVD-Audio formats, but I eventually ditched it in favor of a five-disc Sony DVD player that had only additional SACD decoding. I keep it hooked up for when I want to pop in the few SACDs I have, but for the DVD-As, I'm happy to just use the Dolby Digital or DTS encoding through my Blu-ray player, since I'm not working with the most high-end audiophile receiver/speaker setup anyway.
...this. :thumbup:
Summerfest - Jul 09, 1995*Savage Hall - Sep 22, 1996The Palace of Auburn Hills-Aug 23, 1998 Breslin Center- Aug 18, 1998,The Palace of Auburn Hills-Oct 07, 2000 DTE Energy Theatre-Jun5,2003,DTE Energy Music Theatre - Jun 26, 2003Sports Arena - Oct 02, 2004 Van Andel Arena - May 19, 2006Palace of Auburn Hills-May 22, 2006 Quicken Loans Arena-May 09, 2010
10-16-2014 Detroit
That is an amazing album, and I agree it's very underrated. Thanks for the heads up on it, I might have to look into this 5.1 audio cd thing. I just assumed it died years ago but apparently it's still going!
I do, and I do.
Typo Man: "Thanks kidz, but remembir, stay in skool!"