Excellent points Markus - I am enbroiled in this myself. I love the convenience of Online, but it just cannot stand up to the quality of Blue-Ray. As you say, when the bandwidth gets there, its no contest any more.
It's coming. I already stream high-res video from Netflix via a client box (Roku) the size of a paperback novel. It's not BR quality and nor is the sound, but boy the functionality is about as compelling as it gets, I use it quite a lot.
I've been streaming from NetFlix for over a year now (a member for almost eight) direct to a PC. But its never even close to what I would call "high-res" - I watch it on my 12 foot 1080p system. The best that I ever get is DVD quality, never 1080 and the sound is always only stereo. Nothing that I have streamed has come in at anything but stereo.
Having content below 20 Hz is no mistake. There was an AES paper that listed the low frequency content of some selected demanding pieces probably about 15 or 20 years ago. From memory Jurassic Park had content at 10 and 12 Hz, and certainly there are the well known organ works with 16 Hz content. It is rather absurd to take 20 Hz as the lower limit and either that information in the link is wrong or we/they are misinterpreting it. I believe that they might have meant 20-20K as meaning full bandwidth, with an implied or better. It would not be brick wall filtered and those are certainly not the - 3dB points for softer filters.
The HT bass people are seriously into this:
Top Movies with Bass - Home Theater Systems - Electronics and Forum - HomeTheaterShack
Databass of Movies with Deep Bass (DMDB)
How hard is it to understand that if you're building an HT with the intent of reproducing all the effects, then it should handle them all reasonably well?
Sure, I prefer music but I certainly understand the engineering challenge for HT, and even enjoy a decent HT experience.
You're saying that the use of deep bass is by nature gratuitous?
Maybe that's true; sound effects are for... effect.
I think most AVR's have such a mode. Onkyo calls it "DoubleBass," and Denon calls it "LFE+Main." I don't know what others call it.
I've tried both on my system, and I feel that, given careful calibration of both, Dr. Geddes' overlap method provides more convincing envelopment. Admittedly, I didn't have a Blu-Ray player when I compared them, just SACDs and DVD-A's. (Most of my listening is 2-channel files in Apple Lossless matrixed to 5.1 by DPL2.)
80Hz was just an example and I didn't mention Audyssey in my last postBut honestly I don't recommend using anything higher than that.
Higher can work very well, if you overlap and there are subs all over the place. (I do 120 or 150.) For a conventional setup, 80Hz probably is best.
Not ALL bass is gratuitus and a HT should reproduce effects to the point that they are necessary. But there is also "gratuitous" bass and LF effects that are neither necessary or audible. It's all about practicality and resonableness. My theater goes down to 20 Hz and it can produce pounding bass, but I don't go to extremes to get this and I'm not about to just to just to do 16 Hz on one or two movies. I've not seen a commercial theater that could do that either. Honestly, sounds like bragging rights to me.
Markus, I will agree with "multiple subwoofer optimization assumes a monophonic bass signal", but this does not logically lead to "If one or more sources are excluded, optimization won't work." That's your hypothesis, and it is unproven. You don't know and I don't know if its any better or worse.
The crazy thing about bandwidth is the trend is scaling absurdly fast. Maximum switched bandwidth changed from doubling every 2 years to doubling every 6 months in the late 90's. And we haven't even seen the commoditization of core routers that has happened with storage (RAID) and computation (parallel clusters).
My guess is somewhere past the next decade all connections will have roughly comparable bandwidth, whether it's the 6 foot cable between your disc player and your display or the 250 miles from your house to the nearest netflix data center. Latency is all that will matter.
To put this back on topic since I just sent in a deposit for some nathan's:
What's delivery trending to right now?
I recall there being a thread with a lot of great content from gedlee about finishing speakers. I can't seem to find it via search. Does anyone have a link? I'd like to do some tests on some small speaker stands I'm building next week.
My guess is somewhere past the next decade all connections will have roughly comparable bandwidth, whether it's the 6 foot cable between your disc player and your display or the 250 miles from your house to the nearest netflix data center. Latency is all that will matter.
To put this back on topic since I just sent in a deposit for some nathan's:
What's delivery trending to right now?
I recall there being a thread with a lot of great content from gedlee about finishing speakers. I can't seem to find it via search. Does anyone have a link? I'd like to do some tests on some small speaker stands I'm building next week.
I agree. Movie sound is mixed in studios that really are (smaller) movie theaters. Then there's remastering of movie tracks in normal studios like Mi Casa in LA for Blu-ray or DVD releases.
This makes me doubt that content below 20 Hz was ever intended to be heard on the final medium.
Best, Markus
Replace "won't work" with "might not work as intended". It depends on how many low frequency sources are used and how important each one is for optimization.
The point is to have an optimization that shows reliable results no matter how many subs are used or what programme material is played.
Best, Markus
No, "optimum" is the best approach, not that it is perfect. You are talking about perfect and I am talking about optimum. Let's not confuse the two. We agree that what I do is not "perfect", I have not seen anything that says that it is not "optimum". I truely believe that there is no practical difference from the issue that you note because they are idealized extreme cases. But even one example of "false" is enough to elliminate the technique as "perfect". Its not enough to elliminate it as "optimum".
I'm always shocked how desolate the audio scene has become:
Watch Johannes Mueller's presentation about "Pure Audio Blu-ray"? You'll find it at http://www.aes.org/tutorials/download/file.cfm?ID=129
They now started to talk about the use of Blu-ray for high quality (multichannel) audio. There's even a standardization project AES-X188. Can you believe this? When was Blu-ray introduced? Where were the AES in the standardization process? This makes them look like hobbyists.
I showed real examples from real DVDs. So I don't think I'm discussing idealized cases here.
And no, I'm not talking about perfect. Optimum is good enough this time
By the way, what "optimum" is your current optimization algorithm trying to achieve? Only smallest seat-to-seat variation or smooth frequency response or linear frequency response or any combination of the three?
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