Category Archives: Audio

Kerthump!

Posted on January 21, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

I’m checking out the audio decoding capabilities of the Pioneer BDP-LX70A Blu-ray player and the Yamaha RX-V1800 home theatre receiver. To help me I have Dolby Laboratories’ Blu-ray demo disc, ‘The Sounds of High Definition’. After I had done my … Continue reading →

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Confusion on channels

Posted on January 14, 2008 by Stephen Dawson

Oh wow, this is confusing. HDMI devices talk to each other, but what are they actually saying? As mentioned in the last item, I’ve been working on a roundup of all HD disc players. One of these is the Panasonic … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Compression, Equipment, Testing | Leave a comment

Eight channel PCM

Posted on December 11, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

A reader, Michael, has emailed me about a previous post. He says: Another interesting post there. The Dolby email was quite interesting.I have older AVR without HDMI, so I have an interest in the ability of my receiver (RX-V757) to … Continue reading →

Posted in Audio, Blu-ray, Codecs, HDMI | Leave a comment

Decoding, yes, but in which box?

Posted on December 1, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

The other day I emailed Dolby a question concerning where it thinks Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus will end up being decoded. I think their views also related to DTS-HD Master Audio and DTS-HD High Resolution, although of course … Continue reading →

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‘Dynamic Peak’

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

I’ve been reviewing a lot of subwoofers lately and for almost all of them the manufacturer quotes two power specifications for their built-in amplifiers: the continuous output power (sometimes erroneously labelled ‘RMS’), and ‘dynamic peak’ or similar words. The latter … Continue reading →

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You can’t test everything

Posted on May 13, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

In my reviews I try pretty hard to find all the defects in a product that could reduce user convenience or performance, but, of course, I frequently miss stuff. Last night I was playing a CD of The Who’s Tommy, … Continue reading →

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ABC Digital TV switches to full surround sound — sort of

Posted on April 17, 2007 by Stephen Dawson

I was watching ABC digital TV last night when I happened to notice that the home theatre receiver was indicating that the incoming digital audio was 5.0 channels, rather than the usual 2.0. To double check, I recorded a bit … Continue reading →

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Apple’s iPod takes over the world?

Posted on November 15, 2006 by Stephen Dawson

Apple has announced that six significant international airlines are installing iPod support in their aircraft from next year. The airlines are Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM and United. On these airlines, seat connections will power iPods and provide a … Continue reading →

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iPod weirdness

Posted on April 13, 2006 by Stephen Dawson

Since home theatre receivers are now coming thick and fast with bridges for Apple iPods (Gen 3 and later), Apple has kindly lent me a very fancy iPod indeed. It does video, has a 60GB hard disk and so on. … Continue reading →

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More technical discussion of ‘RMS Watts’

Posted on December 13, 2005 by Stephen Dawson

David Brigden has written to tell me about an article on his Web site that discussed the concept of ‘RMS Watts’. I’ve previously dealt with this on this site, but the article he publishes gives a much more mathematically rigorous … Continue reading →

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