Best Audio Settings for playback on Home Theater System

[christian_stuppy]

Hi there,

I am wondering, what the best audio settings for playback on a home theater system are.

Does it make sense to set the LFE Level to 0 in order to get the "full bass level" and to preserve all the dynamic by setting DRC to "none".

Thanks

Christian

[ux-3]

Buy a CDRW and try it. Give us a summary of your findings. Your questions sounds worthy of (re?)-investigation.

Might also be helpfull to read on the besweet settings.

[UltimateDBZ]

As far as audio bitrates go, human ears cannot detect differences past 160kbps, but it's usually a good idea to set at least 192. CD quality is 320, but that's really overkill.

Edit: Forgot to mention that of course you need to make sure not to downsample to 44.1, in case you didn't already know that ;)

[christian_stuppy]

Hi,

I did some tests (encoding 1 chapter of tomb raider over and over...)

Here are my results:

Setting DRC to none did sound more like the dvd. if i still need drc, I could turn it on on the dvd player.

setting the LFE to 0 gave me too much bass. I had to turn down the bass level on my amp. probably a 1 or a 2 will do best.

my recommendations for best dvd-like sound are:

- using of dolby suround 2
- setting drc to none
- setting LFE level to 1 or 2
- audio bitrate 224
- no downsample

thats it

tell me what you think...

christian

[UltimateDBZ]

Sounds good all except the audio bitrate of 224, it's mainly just personal preference, but there is biologically no reason to go past 160 (so I use 192 just to be safe). Then you have more bits available for your movie, but again, just a matter of preference...

[gerti67]

Hi there,

but you have to keep in mind, that SVCD uses MPEG 1 Layer 2 audio (MP2) and not MPEG 1 Layer 3 (MP3) - totally different animals.

Because of MP3s advanced compression and encoding features the bitrates are not comparable - the audio experts say 192 kBit MP2 is equal to 128 kBit MP3 for example. So 160 kBit MP2 would mean lower than CD quality in this case. And I tend to believe that I can hear the difference between 160 kBit MP2 and 224 kBit MP2 - "look" out for car crash scenes and something like that and you hear the difference.

Another thing is, that creating a Dolby surround compatible stereo downmix needs additional bitrate for the rear channels so it is better to use a little higher bitrates and BeSweets new Dolby surround 2 compatible matrix (which will be supported in the next DVD2SVCD release also) needs at least 192 kBit MP2 bitrate as a minimum to give you some quality.

Hope this helps,
Gerti

[UltimateDBZ]

Ahh, now that (audio differences between mp2 and mp3) I had not considered. By all means then, 224 is good :)