Dolby takes Blu-ray sound to the next level

18 May 12 15:36 by in category Blu-ray writers & players

Dolby Laboratories has announced that it has developed 96KHz upsampling  for mastering Blu-ray discs with Dolby TrueHD soundtracks. The technology, called by its fullname: Dolby TrueHD Advanced 96k Upsampling technology is compatible with current Blu-ray players and studio’s using it can improve the quality of PCM audio before lossless Dolby TrueHD encoding is done.

Besides the upsampling part, the technology also introduces a filter that works against the preringing effect, a side-effect that comes with analog/digital conversion and which is masked by the filter. The algorithms used in this technology are developed by the company Meridian. This company first implemented the technology in a reference CD player, but now the CPU intensive sampling moves from the actual end product to the post processing part of the development of Blu-ray content.

5 Comments on Dolby takes Blu-ray sound to the next level

CDan
Posts: 3913
Posted on: 18 May 12 17:29
Smoke and mirrors.
olddancer
Posts: 285
Posted on: 18 May 12 23:20
Until the soundtracks are recorded at at least 192kbs, who cares?
96kbs is still crap.
ivid
Posts: 723
Posted on: 18 May 12 23:44
You are totally misunderstanding. This is the sampling rate not the bitrate of the media.

Dolby True HD bitrates can be up to 18 Mbps (which is same as uncompressed). That's Megabits. Not petty kbps like an MP3 file.

Its not smoke and mirrors this is Dolby labs were talking about. Uncompressed & lossless audio formats are a big deal if you have the equipment for it (its obviously a niche thing).
paulw2
Posts: 312
Posted on: 19 May 12 01:44
Dolby True HD ?? I think I have only 1 movie with this sound on. The default sound these days seems to be DTS MA which is interesting as in the days of DVD (remember those?) it was the other way around..
CDan
Posts: 3913
Posted on: 19 May 12 05:33
Quote:
Originally Posted by ivid View Post
You are totally misunderstanding. This is the sampling rate not the bitrate of the media.

Dolby True HD bitrates can be up to 18 Mbps (which is same as uncompressed). That's Megabits. Not petty kbps like an MP3 file.

Its not smoke and mirrors this is Dolby labs were talking about. Uncompressed & lossless audio formats are a big deal if you have the equipment for it (its obviously a niche thing).
The article is about upsampling audio to 96KHz sample rates. Presumably referring to upsampling 48KHz to 96 in the authoring stage. Completely useless and adds nothing to audio quality. All it does is let the studio claim to have 96KHz audio on their titles. If the audio was originally created at 96KHz, it wouldn't need this process.

Dolby THD at 24/96KHz and even 24/192 already exists, although it's rare. But it wasn't manufactured using some fake upsampling gimmick.
Tell us, what do you think about

Dolby takes Blu-ray sound to the next level

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