Well, I remain on my so-far fruitless search for a DVD Audio disc with useful audio test signals. I had my hopes up for the AIX 8200 Start Here disc, which I just bought today from Rockian Trading for a reasonable $25. Rockian kindly throw in AIX’s first DVD Audio sampler as well.
Unfortunately the test tone don’t help me out. The reason? They’re all DVD Video test tones, not DVD Audio. This means that they are useful for aligning your surround decoder for playing back movies and music DVDs, but not for DVD Audio! You see, most DVD Audio players either do not perform speaker time alignment, or bass management, or both for the DVD Audio material. Their manuals tend not be explicit about this. Some just don’t mention it at all, while others mention it briefly in the notes somewhere within the manual. The only way you can be certain that your DVD Audio player does all this properly is to read one of the few carefully conducted reviews (most reviews don’t actually touch on this subject at all!), or to test it yourself.
It is because of these omissions in most DVD Audio players that many DVD Audio discs actually sound better playing back the Dolby Digital version of the material than they do the surround MLP version, at least in the great majority of real-world home surround systems.
Checking out these decoding capabilities with actual music recordings is a slow process, requiring me to find visually identifiable markers on recordings of the various channels’ analogue outputs. Looks like I’m going to have to keep on doing it this way for a while longer.
On the brighter side, the AIX disc has lots of music sampler tracks. The stereo ones, on a quick first listen, sound eerily like actually having the instruments in the room.