captainsolo said:
Is there a big difference between this and the PWNGE? Love the fact that these have a higher quality transfer of the 93 audio straight from the LD instead of the crappy GOUT audio.
dj's GOUT-sourced Star Wars
Audio 1: '93 mix DD 2.0s @ 384kbps (from LD PCM)
Audio 2: '93 mix upmixed to DD 5.1 @ 448kbps (from LD PCM)
Audio 3: '77 mono mix DD 1.0 @ 96kbps (from Belbucus restoration)
Average video bitrate: 6500kbps
Total disc size inc. menus, etc: 6.43GB
Lucasfilm Pwnage Edition
Audio 1: '93 mix DD 2.0s @ 192kbps (from LD PCM)
Audio 2: '77 mono mix DD 1.0 @ 96kbps (from Belbucus restoration)
Audio 3: '77 Dolby Stereo mix DD 2.0s @ 192kbps (from LD analogue cap)
Average video bitrate: 4500kbps
Total disc size inc. menus, etc: 4.37GB
As you can see from the specs above, both mine and dj's discs have audio track 1 sourced from the LD PCM.
I used 192kbps as it is Dolby's suggested data rate for 2-channel AC3. I suspect that most people would not be able to tell the difference between the compressed AC3 and the uncompressed PCM in an ABX session, but those with "golden ears" and expensive hi-fi's might fare better with dj's 384kbps.
Dynamic range compression (DRC) is a separate issue from audio data compression. I was under the impression that the GOUT audio was from the same source as the DC laserdiscs, so it's surprising to see reports of DRC in the GOUT audio.
Sorry if this sounds obvious, but are you sure that DRC is disabled in your Dolby Digital decoder?
Another potential source of DRC is the DD encoding process itself. Dolby licensed encoders generally include pre-processing filters that are turned on by default, intended to make the audio data more compressible. I have heard that these filters can reduce the dynamic range of the input signal, although this is only secondhand, I have no hard evidence to support this. TBH I doubt that this is the cause of the DRC that hairy_hen noticed on TESB - but to be safe, I turned all these filters off when I encoded the audio for Pwnage.