Blu-ray Audio - Curious

[Kimo]

This weekend I picked up a couple of 40 year old albums and zero BRs.  Plenty of vinyl playback options left, but not an audiophile BR player left in production, except for the Cambridge transport built on the Oppo platform.  

 

I will run my Oppo 103 HD vanity transport until it dies, but blu ray audio discs won't be on my shopping list any longer.  Not even sure about SACDs.

[Veovis]

Foobar can read MKV files (created by MakeMKV) and convert each chapter to a flac file. That's how I rip blu-ray discs. I add metadata manually with dBPoweramp if Foobar fails to identify the artist/album. Sometimes use VLC with the original MKV file for identification.

[Northern_Canuck]

I get the best results by ripping the blu ray disk and open the file in Adobe Premiere Pro. Then export the audio track to Adobe Audition. Once you are in Adobe Audtion youi can do anything you want to the sound track. This is the best processing chain I have found for extracting audio from DVD\Blu Ray discs. Only draw back you are limited to PCM editing and the software is not cheap.

[srrndhound]

On 7/22/2018 at 7:33 PM, jabbr said:

DVDFab claims to be able to remove the jitter adding Cinavia watermark. 

I looked here and did not see any claim wrt to jitter. Can you point me?

[srrndhound]

On 7/15/2018 at 5:27 PM, audiophile65 said:

Just wanted to ask if any of you have had any experiences - both good and bad - with Blu-ray Audio recordings? Now I'm not going to be going hog wild with BD-A, but I am thinking about (haven't decided yet) purchasing a total of 3 or 5 albums (at most) on BD-A, next be extracted (final product being a 2-channel stereo 24/96 LPCM file), and then incorporated into my music library.

 

I'm considering the following BD-A's:

Alan Parsons Project - Eye in the Sky

Alan Parsons Project - Tales of Mystery and Imagination: Edgar Allen Poe

Simple Minds - Once Upon a Time

 

Any thoughts, experiences, or comments about BD-A would be greatly appreciated

I deliberately ordered the Eye In The Sky disc ?, and am very impressed with the improved transparency of the sound, and of course the 5.1 effect. The mix is at once familiar and yet regularly reveals new aspects of each component of the performance.

 

Due to these qualities,  I felt  it was worth the extra effort needed to rip for Roon 5.1 playback. This required extra steps because DVD Audio Extractor apparently does not crack BD+, so I started with MakeMKV which produced one track comprising the entire album. I separated the tracks with MKVToolnix, then finally converted the .mka files to FLAC with Total Audio MP3 Converter. (Others have given alternative tools that lead to a similar end result). 

[srrndhound]

On 8/13/2018 at 2:48 PM, Kimo said:

This weekend I picked up a couple of 40 year old albums and zero BRs.  Plenty of vinyl playback options left, but not an audiophile BR player left in production, except for the Cambridge transport built on the Oppo platform.  

 

I will run my Oppo 103 HD vanity transport until it dies, but blu ray audio discs won't be on my shopping list any longer.  Not even sure about SACDs.

Well, you're in luck.☺️  This is the Computer Audiophile forum, and there's plenty of experts here who can point you to ways to play BDs and SACDs without an audiophile disc player, with equal or better fidelity and vastly improved convenience.. 

[Teresa]

On 7/18/2018 at 5:42 PM, tmtomh said:

The biggest Blu-Ray Audio negative for me is that my main audio system is an audio-only system, and I don't like to keep a monitor connected to my universal disc player. I've found that Blu-Ray Audio discs have relatively complex menus that, unlike some DVD-A discs, are impossible to navigate "blind." And of course SACDs have no video menus at all and are super easy to navigate.

 

I only have one audio-only Blu-ray disc: Ravel: La Valse, Ma mere l'Oye, Tzigane, Bolero, Pavane it's from Tacet and it doesn't require a menu to play: The default is multichannel, one uses their remote control to chose between Multichannel (Red button) Stereo (Yellow button) **see picture below**.

 

I mostly buy only from audiophile labels and Tacet is one of the few audiophile labels on Blu-ray, and the only title so far I was interested in. At any rate are you saying none of your audio-only Blu-ray discs use the color buttons on the remote to move between programs blind? That is a shame, now I will have to check the back of Blu-ray discs before purchasing.

 

I agree SACDs are superior as no navigating is necessary. One just sets up their player to output Stereo or Multichannel in the "Setup" menu when one first gets their player. SACD is by far my favorite physical format for both sound quality and ease of playing.

[tmtomh]

6 hours ago, Teresa said:

 

I only have one audio-only Blu-ray disc: Ravel: La Valse, Ma mere l'Oye, Tzigane, Bolero, Pavane it's from Tacet and it doesn't require a menu to play: The default is multichannel, one uses their remote control to chose between Multichannel (Red button) Stereo (Yellow button) **see picture below**.

 

I mostly buy only from audiophile labels and Tacet is one of the few audiophile labels on Blu-ray, and the only title so far I was interested in. At any rate are you saying none of your audio-only Blu-ray discs use the color buttons on the remote to move between programs blind? That is a shame, now I will have to check the back of Blu-ray discs before purchasing.

 

I agree SACDs are superior as no navigating is necessary. One just sets up their player to output Stereo or Multichannel in the "Setup" menu when one first gets their player. SACD is by far my favorite physical format for both sound quality and ease of playing.

 

Thanks Teresa, for this example and information.

 

I have very few Blu-Ray discs - only four, in fact. One of them - Tears for Fears' Songs from the Big Chair, does have some ability to toggle the mixes/versions with the color keys on my player's remote. Two others, though - the recent Led Zeppelin reissues of How the West Was Won and The Song Remains the Same - require fairly complex navigation involving three of the four arrow keys, in order to select any audio track other than the default (multichannel DTS-HD). (I can't recall how the fourth, XTC's Skylarking, works, as I haven't played that Blu-Ray in a little while.)

 

So I would guess that it varies.

[jabbr]

On 9/17/2018 at 12:18 AM, srrndhound said:

Due to these qualities,  I felt  it was worth the extra effort needed to rip for Roon 5.1 playback. This required extra steps because DVD Audio Extractor apparently does not crack BD+, so I started with MakeMKV which produced one track comprising the entire album. I separated the tracks with MKVToolnix, then finally converted the .mka files to FLAC with Total Audio MP3 Converter. (Others have given alternative tools that lead to a similar end result). 

 

Yeah I'd really like to be able to use BD sourced music. I got the Gilmour: Live at Pompeii BD and ripped to MKV but the splitting and tagging step was manual. The MKVToolnix tool looks great and I need to check out, but something that autotagged/split would be the key.

[audiophile65]

17 hours ago, Teresa said:

 

I only have one audio-only Blu-ray disc: Ravel: La Valse, Ma mere l'Oye, Tzigane, Bolero, Pavane it's from Tacet and it doesn't require a menu to play: The default is multichannel, one uses their remote control to chose between Multichannel (Red button) Stereo (Yellow button) **see picture below**.

 

I mostly buy only from audiophile labels and Tacet is one of the few audiophile labels on Blu-ray, and the only title so far I was interested in. At any rate are you saying none of your audio-only Blu-ray discs use the color buttons on the remote to move between programs blind? That is a shame, now I will have to check the back of Blu-ray discs before purchasing.

 

I agree SACDs are superior as no navigating is necessary. One just sets up their player to output Stereo or Multichannel in the "Setup" menu when one first gets their player. SACD is by far my favorite physical format for both sound quality and ease of playing.

 

Hi Teresa,

 

Thanks for sharing with us! It's always so cool to hear from you! ?

[Veovis]

On ‎10‎/‎21‎/‎2018 at 5:26 PM, jabbr said:

 

Yeah I'd really like to be able to use BD sourced music. I got the Gilmour: Live at Pompeii BD and ripped to MKV but the splitting and tagging step was manual. The MKVToolnix tool looks great and I need to check out, but something that autotagged/split would be the key.

 

As I wrote earlier, Foobar reads MKV-files (ripped by MakeMKV in my case) and lets you convert each chapter (track) to flac or wav or whatever. Use the Discogs tagger plug in and things become even easier!