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Musical Musings
DVD-Video as an Audio Delivery Medium

Musical Musings
Dan Dickerman, founder Dickerman Audio Labs

I was once told that I was extrodinarily gifted because I could be moved to tears by music. The thought hadn't occurred to me: I believe music speaks to people on an emotional level, and would hope that everyone could experience the wide range of emotion which it can communicate. Maybe I'm just being optimistic. While it's not yet clear to me who is in the majority here, I believe that music speaks to each of us for different reasons, on different levels and at different depths. Whether a particular piece of music moves you because of a personal memory which connects you to it, because you can empathize with a story being told through music, or becuase it somehow embodies a feeling which resonates within you, the feeling of giving yourself over to that wash of emotion is incomparable.

One might think that the evolution of recorded music, which has made music available in so many more places for everyone, would have helped more people develop a deep appreciation for music. The ubiquitousness seems, however, to have had the opposite effect. To many, music has become background-noise in life: something not deserving of their direct attention. And so, these people develop a passing familiarity with the music they encounter, rather than a deep appreciation for anything in particular.

Consumer audio developement constantly works towards two divergent goals: one goal is to give the best possible quality of audio reproduction, the other is to provide music in more convenient media. Although one would prefer to achieve both ends of this spectrum, striving towards achieve one goal is usually done by sacrificing some of the other. The problem then comes when those sacrifices become so mainstream and accepted as to be the only method by which music is provided.

When people are focussed primarily on sound quality, they care only for the quality of musical sound and make few concessions to cost or convenience in their audio gear. They take time to listen to music directly and attentively, and flock to concert halls and other live performances so as to enjoy music firsthand. If these sorts of people were in the majority, audio-reproduction equipment would only be sold which could reproduce sound as faithfully as possible, and several entire audio types and recording formats which have existed over the years would not have come into existance, at least not for long, due to their poor sound reproduction quality.

The truth is that more people are concerned with convenience than with quality. Being able to have music easily accessable has been a convenience for which people many people have been willing to sacrifice audio quality. This trend feeds off itself, in that it drives how music has been delivered to listeners. And if all of the easily available audio recordings are of mediocre sound quality, then listeners never realize what they are missing.

Everyone owes it to themselves to experience live musical performances, and to hear the quality of sound possible with good recordings and audio equipment. Focus, listen, and be moved.

DVD-Video as an Audio Delivery Medium

While the consumer audio industry is busily ironing-out the details of the higher bitrate digital successors to CD-audio, delivery of better-than-CD-quality audio has been possible for years now, as part of the DVD-Video standard.

Key here is that the fundamentals of improved audio quality in a digital medium are largely independent of the specific delivery format. An increase in the digital sampling rate decreases aliasing and filter distortions, and an increase in the number of bits in each sample reduces the potential noise floor. CD digital audio is made of stereo 16-bit samples taken at a rate of 44100 per second, so any medium which delivers audio at a higher sampling rate or with more bits in each sample has the potential to offer better sound quality than CD.

Although designed with a focus on video delivery, the DVD-Video medium allows for several different encodings on its audio tracks, with a maximum 96khz sampling of uncompressed stereo 24-bit words. The use of 24/96 digital audio is already quite an improvement over the capabilities of CD-Audio, and is the digital format of choice in the majority of digital mastering situations today. The fact that 24/96 audio is being delivered in a "video" format determines the type of hardware which plays it, but not the quality of the audio itself.

Still some may ask: why deliver on DVD-Video rather than DVD-Audio or SACD? The reason is simply that DVD-Video is currently a far more mature format. There are more DVD-Video players in use than those for either of these formats, and the tools for authoring discs are more widely available and well-tested. Most importantly as of this writing, the vast majority of DVD-A and SACD players currently being sold do not offer a digital link for connecting existing processing/switching hardware. This analog-out-only approach to current DVD-A and SACD players requires duplicated D/A hardware, duplicated bass management systems (if done properly at all), and additional multi-channel analog switching circuitry. Once DVD-A and SACD settle their copy-protection concerns, which has led not only to their analog-out-only approach but substantially hindered each format's rollout, we believe that these issues will be ironed-out, and we hope to deliver DORIS-mastered recordings on these formats at that time.

These DORIS-processed titles authored to the DVD-Video format are created with a complete video track and without a menu, allowing them to play without connecting a TV for navigation. While the video track is mostly black, showing only brief markers to indicate the start of each chapter marker, it allows the disc to be scanned and searched much in the same manner as a conventional audio disc.

Before embarking on your 24/96 audio adventure, please verify that your DVD-Video player is capable of properly decoding this sort of audio stream, and can play discs recorded in the DVD-R format. Because of concerns over the use of higher bitrate audio, some players which can read 24/96 audio streams will downconvert them to 16/48 (16-bit samples at 48khz) before sending the data for D/A conversion, thus negating nearly all of the benefits of the higher bitrate. Consult your DVD player's manual and ensure the player's settings are correct for passing 24/96 audio. Also, players some first-generation DVD players are unable to read the DVD-R (recordable DVD) format. If you are unsure of your player's ability to play 24/96 DVD-R discs, purchase one of our sampler discs to ensure compatibility before requesting a custom mastering of your own.