One of those most important factors to many of us is the concept of sound. Granted, I still find visuals integral in telling a story (which is the reason I'm an animation major), but I can't help but feel that audio can be the most important factor in creating something (at least when mixing the two together). There's no doubt that on their own, these creatures are two different monsters. It's to visually express sound sound to a deaf person, like the rhythmic strums of a guitar; similarly, it's near impossible to describe the full visual brilliance of a painting through words alone to a blind man, like the use of blending complimentary colors in an organic way. I could go on about both, but I want to focus on audio today. The reason being is that I just got myself the remastered version or Rush's album "Moving Pictures." Why? It came with a blu-ray (a high definition disc meant to contain higher quality audio and visuals, depending on the usage).
I listened to the album and it sounded FANTASTIC. This is no doubt the best I've heard some of this music in quite some time. Generally I've only been able to hear the music on the radio (and because of the limited bandwith, a lot it lost in the process), or go as far as playing their song "Limelight" on the game "Rock Band," which enables one to play the song in Dolby Digital (a codec that enables a person to hear higher quality sound with true surround due to processed audio separation in each of the channels). It sounded great, but despite the cleanliness of the audio, the amount of compression, there is still data lost. According to the information case, it's practically hearing what one hears in the studio, due to increased information being played.
Before I continue, I should probably explain more about the concept of data. Basically, there are several factors that one must know about: the sampling rate (the amount of times something is played per second), the bit depth (how much data is present in each individual sample being played), and the amount of channels being used (or speaker number). This results in the eventual "bit rate," or how much data is being played. The thought of this came to me as I listened to this new, higher resolution mix of the music. The overall bit rate for this music (in surround sound) was 13.8 megabits per second (mbps). Compared to a regular CD in stereo, this is about 10 times the bit rate (which is 1.411 mbps). The reason being is because for the bluray, the sampling rate was increased to 96khz from 44.1 khz and the bit depth was increased to 24-bit encoding to 16-bit encoding. For a CD, this results in about 700kbps per channel. For the blu-ray, it averages out to about 2.76 mbps per channel.
The reason I'm mentioning this is because I owned a music DVD as well involving Cirque du Soleil's "Love," involving a remix of some of the music of The Beatles. The music was on a DVD and did surround as well. The bit rate averaged to about 1.5mbps (on DTS, or Digital Theater Surround). However despite this higher bit rate, it's nowhere near as good as a CD, which is considered "uncompressed." The reason? Despite a high sampling rate, the bit-depth is lower and the audio is dispersed amongst more channels. In essence, on the highest encode, the bit rate averaged out to 300kbps (although in all accuracy, it would be close to 400kbps, due to the way it's processed). This made me realize that, for the longest while, we really weren't getting the full with music when we listened to it on a DVD. The blu ray on audio/ super-audio CDs are relatively new. This makes me wonder, is the overall quality really worth sacrificing for the "immersive" experience?
Well, that's a questionable factor. The idea of surround sound is to make the music seem more life, like a concert. It also helps separate the tracks, so one can hear instruments in the individual channels. Plus, it IS rather difficult to discern the sound difference at that much of a bit rate difference. However, for some audio purists (and those with better hearing), quality is a deal breaker. It results in certain acoustics being "erased," which results in a duller sound and a lack of a great range in both volume and frequencies. However, with the deteriorating hearing levels of people, one has to wonder if quality is simply a secondary thought now.
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