Jan 30th, 2012

Tweaking The Rock In Rio DVD Audio

We've seen that a few people have noticed some sound problems with the playback of the Rock in Rio DVD. We asked the Production team who put the DVD together to list a few things to try to help out.

Here is what they suggest:

1. DialNorm and Dynamic range settings. DialNorm, this a feature of Dolby Digital that trys to match sound levels between different sources. Rock in Rio is set at -31dBfs which technically overides DialNorm.

In conjunction with DialNorm are dynamic range compression options, which compromise the audio quality. Rock in Rio has no compression data added to Dolby Digital stream.

Users should select maximum Dynamic Range in the Dolby Digital settings on the player and not use the late-night or midnight modes as this will result in unpleasant pumping of the audio levels. These modes are only suitable for movies not music.

All these settings are to ensure the highest possible quality that matches the DA-98 48khz 24bit audio master used.

2. Stereo 2 channel playback. Rock in Rio is meant to listened to in 5.1 Dolby Digital/DTS or Dolby Surround (Down-mixed from 5.1).

If a user wants to playback in 2 channel stereo you need to use the DVD players menu to set the Dolby Digital sound ouput to Stereo (Lo Ro) or Dolby Headphone, not Dolby Surround (LtRt) as there is significant information in the surround channels which is lost when the 5.1 is downmixed to Dolby Surround and then played on 2 channel stereo systems. When you select Stereo or Dolby Headphone the surround channel is mixed in for stereo playback.

Many players also have a mode for playing back 5.1 on 2 speakers like SRS TruSurround etc.