Thread: Dolby HD Upsampling comes to Blu Ray Audio! Who'da thought?!??!

Yes I came upon this yesterday. With the recent announcement of high res downloads coming out of Japan in Dolby TrueHD this announcement is pretty germane.

Dolby® Upsamples & Apodizes TrueHD | Stereophile.com

I can't say whether this is a good or bad thing. One would think the guys at Stereophile have at least a passing interest in audio. Apparently the author heard good things upsampling an orchestral piece. Not so much the pop stuff. They almost (but not quite) made it sound like they were extracting dynamics that were not present in the original recording. But we know that can't be right?

Alas, when going on to Qobuz or HDtracks, unless you are a dinosaur or a specialty label, most of the stuff coming out on major labels is coming out 24/44.1. If you sold a gazillion records in the 70s you likely have a home studio where you are doing 24/96. The majors however do seem to be gearing up for something. Hopefully the upsampling thing is just a typo. ;-)

Originally Posted by bleedink

Hopefully the upsampling thing is just a typo. ;-)

Unfortunately not - the Dolby HD seems to be just another way to do upsampling.

Originally Posted by Julf

Unfortunately not - the Dolby HD seems to be just another way to do upsampling.

I guess the only bonus here is that they clearly figured out they were not going to be able to get consumers to go out and buy new bluray players. That is something. Theoretically BluRay offers just about all we could ever need in terms of SQ. It sounds like they are using the same kind of filters modern AVRs are using to help make mp3s sound better. Also one important note is that it seems they will be labeling their discs with this information. So at least we will know it's been upsampled. Anyone know if this would actually benefit the music? Like I said we would hope the folks at Stereophile at least have a passing interest in this audio 'stuff'. The better question, being as how these are all recent recordings, is why they weren't recorded that way in the first place! If pre-ringing and such is such a big problem why did they record it that way? OTOH there are lots of bad recordings and I guess if dolby can make them sound better and they label it as such perhaps it's a win-win.

Originally Posted by bleedink

ILike I said we would hope the folks at Stereophile at least have a passing interest in this audio 'stuff'.

As opposed to making their advertisers happy? I know, I am turning into a cynical Grumpy Old Man.

Originally Posted by Julf

As opposed to making their advertisers happy? I know, I am turning into a cynical Grumpy Old Man.

I did say 'at least a passing interest'! I'm sure Dolby has been happy with them for a while!

Out of curiosity, the main raision d'etre for this tech seems to be the elimination of pre-ringing in digitally recorded audio. Personally, I've heard this but didn't realize it was an issue that wasn't already being dealt with. For example, I don't really ever recall hearing something I've listened to echo before the actual vocal. Is it already filtered out by the time it gets to me? And is that step done in my DAC/Amp or in the recording chain? If I am not mistaken it seems that this is already being done on the hardware level. So if you take an upsampled recording, play it on say an optical player that may or may not be upsampling-then onto a receiver and/or DAC that is likely upsampling, aren't you approaching for lack of better terminology terminal upsample velocity? Is there a benefit to doing multiple upsamples of the same material throughout the chain? I would assume there would be some negatives. Thanks in advance. Not sure this would add anything relevant but I'm curious as to why we need filters at every single step.