Dolby's TrueHD 96K Upsampling To Improve Sound On Blu-Rays

Stowie101 writes in with a story about your Blu-ray audio getting better. "The audio on most Blu-ray discs is sampled at 48kHz. Even the original movie tracks are usually only recorded at 48kHz, so once a movie migrates to disc, there isn't much that can be done. Dolby's new system upsamples that audio signal to 96kHz at the master stage prior to the Dolby TrueHD encoding, so you get lossless audio with fewer digital artifacts. The 'fewer digital artifacts' part comes from a feature of Dolby's upsampling process called de-apodizing, which corrects a prevalent digital artifact known as pre-ringing. Pre-ringing is often introduced in the capture and creation process and adds a digital harshness to the audio. The apodizing filter masks the effect of pre-ringing by placing it behind the source tone — the listener can't hear the pre-ringing because it's behind the more prevalent original signal."

Re:You cant hear it anyway.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that experiment failed to use monster cables then

Re:You cant hear it anyway.

[aardvarkjoe]

That's just because your hardware sucks. If you use the correct equipment [amazon.com], anyone with a discerning ear will be able to hear the difference.

Re:You cant hear it anyway.

[MightyYar]

This might be my favorite review ever on Amazon:

These cables deliver crisp clear sound and are worth every penny. The sound, in all ranges, is amazing. My panoramic eq has never sounded better. I just have one gripe. My Television sometimes won't turn off ever since I've started using these cables with my stereo surround system. In fact it's on right now despite the fact that it's not even plugged in to the electrical outlet. I'm not sure how but these cables are supplying independent power to my television and stereo receiver. It's really cut down on my electricity bill even though, at times, I've lost the ability to control my TV.

Another downside is that, occasionally, there will be high pitched shrill sounds through the speakers. Almost as if a young woman is screaming. It doesn't happen all the time though. Usually it's around 3am when the TV turns itself on. I'm not sure why. It always turns on this show called "Hell Beast". Tivo is not set to record it but, without fail, it turns on every night at 3:33 am. I'm not sure what it's about. There's some sort of gargoyle or mutant goat or something. I think it's a monster movie show. Although they never show a movie and the goat monster guy just says "I want you" over and over. I think it's British or something. I don't really understand the humor. I'm usually tending to my newborn daughter who's routinely wakes up crying because of the screaming coming out of the television. It's funny too because that goat character on the show sometimes yells the name Shannon and that's the name of my daughter. LOL...

Other than those few issues I'm really enjoying the free electricity. It's helped with $$. Especially after all the money I had to drop re-soding my lawn after some teenagers burnt a star into my front lawn. Some stupid neighborhood gang. They're calling themselves 9-9-9.

lol wut

[Alex Belits]

pre-ringing

Really? In an uncompressed audio? And the solution not only involves upsampling as a part of the process but requires the signal to stay upsampled?

My eyes are rolling at 15krpm.

Re:Unsampling ... then re-sampling in 96KHz?

[Austerity Empowers]

Obviously you can't unsample and re-record an audio stream to reduce pre-ringing or de-apodizing all but the smallest apods. All you are doing is essentially taking harsh audio and putting it on qualudes. This simply produces depressed, harsh audio, like Norm Macdonald.

Time and money would be better spent using gold plated, neon injected, forward biased monster cables, with gallium arsenide softening strips. The justification for using gold plated, neon injected, forward biased monster cables is well known by audiophiles. The gallium arsenide softening strips work by absorbing the harsh pre-ringing frequencies by actually siphoning out the high frequencies. Silicon engineers have long known that gallium arsenide is ideal for conducting the highest frequency signalling. Used in this application it acts as sort of a apod rejection filter, allowing the ringing to be thrown free of the cable, before it can manifest as ringing, or even chirping.

However it is important to stress that the gallium arsenide softening strips must be calibrated to your eardrums carefully before use. You will need a vector analyzer and a sound meter. It's crucial that you place the softening strips in your mouth, while providing the four port network the VNA requires using both your feet and hands. You must suck on the strips until the sound meter absorbs all the s-parameters in your body, which are being slowly drained by the gallium arsenide strips. You must maintain this until the sound meter gets down to at least 3dB (or 1dB if you have especially sensitive ears). Without this step you may as well be using a walmart SPDIF cable, it will be that bad.