DVD's mastered differently or ??

madmax

As a blast from the past I got my laserdisc hooked up over the weekend. I watched a bunch of old favorites and noticed something pretty dramatic. The dynamics of all the movies seems to be much greater on the laserdiscs than what I have grown accustomed to on the DVD players I've had. I'm defining "dynamics" here as the difference between whispers and large scale bombs, car chases etc. There is close to twice the dynamic differences on the laserdiscs than DVD's. I'm wondering if this is a mastering difference or if there is a technical reason for DVD's to be somewhat "adjusted" for less dynamics. I know many non-videophiles are driven nuts by trying to listen at lower volumes and less dynamics would be a good thing for them. Any opinions?

madmax

SKsolutions

Most of the old ones were uncompressed two channel I believe.

madmax

I'm just amazed at how different they sound with the increased dynamics. I ordered 40 more LD's off ebay to play with. At a buck fifty each it seemed like a good deal...
madmax

jakelm

Bit Rate, compression. More info on same size disk. Same crap they are doing to music. Movies are adding so many "special" features and previews, its leaving little room for the actual movie, so everything has to be compressed. Dual layer disk are even getting over crowded.

LOTR, is one of my fav demo disk. Less compressed and New Line, said "yeah we could probably cramm it on one DL disk, but screw it, we'll put it on two disk and not compress it".

You should see Star Wars on LD, absolutly stunning.

jakelm

True

As the Laserdisc format is not digitally encoded and does not make use of compression techniques, it is immune from macroblocking (most visible as blockiness during high motion sequences) or contrast banding (subtle visible lines in gradient areas, such as skies or light casts from spotlights) that can be caused by the MPEG-2 encoding process as video is prepared for DVD. However, proprietary human-assisted encoders manually operated by specialist experts vastly reduce the incidence of artifacts in better releases. Proponents of LaserDisc argue that Laserdisc maintains a "smoother", more "film-like" image while DVD still looks slightly more artificial. This is similar to the CD versus LP sound quality debates common in the audiophile community.