Hi All,

I have been using my new Panasonic 32PD50 for a couple of weeks now and so far I'm very impressed. Hooked up a Sagem Freeview box at the weekend and that sorted out the minor ghosting problems I was getting on Analogue.

Only remaining question is regarding sound. The sound is actually pretty good but I can;t honestly detect any difference between Stereo and V. Dolby.

My question is " do I need to hook the DVD up to the TV using a seperate audio connector (e.g. optical) or should virtual Dolby work from a SCART feed?

TIA,
Carl

[Tight Git]

Originally Posted by spinout

Only remaining question is regarding sound. The sound is actually pretty good but I can't honestly detect any difference between Stereo and V. Dolby.

Neither can anyone else!

No, that's a little unfair.

You will occasionally hear a sound that appears to come from outside the area of the tv.

However, by no stretch of the imagination do you get "proper" surround.

After all, why would people spend lots of money cluttering their rooms with loudspeakers if "Virtual Dolby" did the job.

[Zacabeb]

The funny thing about Virtual Dolby and other "pseudo-surround" methods for reproducing Dolby Surround is that they are not always as good at giving you virtual surround as the raw stereo signal itself.

In Dolby Surround, the surround channel is embedded into the 2-channel stereo signal by shifting the sound out-of-phase between the channels. This results in it being opposite in left and right, and that's what the decoder recognizes it by. But it also has a nice psychoacoustic side-effect, which is that the brain perceives out-of-phase sounds as coming from behind. So, even when left unencoded, you do get a virtual surround effect from Dolby Surround material.

You can even get a surround effect from undecoded Dolby Surround using headphones.

On DVD's in Dolby Digital 5.1, the sound is usually encoded so that it can be downmixed into Dolby Surround by the DVD player. To do this, you have to set your DVD player's sound output to something exceptionally obvious, like "Lt/Rt", "D.Sur.Dwnmx" or "DPL comp.". (I love DVD players. They're like little text-based computer games.)

What Virtual Dolby does is decode the sound using Dolby Pro Logic, and then remix the decoded surround signal back into left and right. The only difference is that the surround content is not quite as out-of-phase as before, it's gone through some filtering, and it may be delayed by a few milliseconds. This is proper, but might end up giving you a less distinct virtual surround field than raw, undecoded Dolby Surround.

I have experienced this a lot with Dolby Pro Logic. I was never quite happy with its performance because it is unstable by nature, more or less depending on the particular decoder. A few times I was amazed however at how good a surround effect I got, only to realize I had actually forgotten to turn Dolby Pro Logic on...

[Tight Git]

Originally Posted by Zacabeb

Pictures that looked really good
Remote controls you understood
Cabinets made out of wood
Those were the days...

...and enough heat from the line timebase valves to warm the whole house!



(Sorry, I know but I couldn't resist. Happy Christmas! )