Laserdisc Mega Thread

[ToroidalBoat]

It was a really popular medium for anime back in the 80's and 90's, right?

And very, very overpriced, which seems to have led to anime being seen as geeky there.

 

[Lunete]

I don't know much about the format myself but i like how some of their error screens had a cute little turtle on them.

 

[XYZpdq]

And very, very overpriced, which seems to have led to anime being seen as geeky there.

iirc in a lot of cases vhs was more expensive than LD in Japan
also regarding the video quality it depends on the disc, the old CLV ones from CBS/FOX with the grey packaging were particularly shitty, they used ugly vhs masters on top of being CLV, the laserdisc's answer to EP tapes

 

[Gone Ham]

Supposedly, it was like the grandfather of CDs and DVDs, and was not very popular in the US or Europe, but had more of a following in Japan:

LaserDisc - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

VHS is what I'm personally familiar with.

It’s the first optical disc, so it basically is the grandpa of the CD and DVD. Without it, optical media (cd and dvd) would’ve been a lot different or maybe might’ve never existed at all

 

[BootlegPopeye]

As a KF old, Laserdiscs used to be for the premium videophile. They catered to the elite movie collector crowd, and I believe they were the first to get widescreen releases of movies instead of the awful cropped 4:3 releases they did on CED, Betamax and VHS (though I understand some late VHS releases were done in widescreen). So I do credit them for proving there was a market for widescreen, and I am sure others will remember widescreen DVDs eventually killed off 'full screen' releases which used to get released side by side with them.

 

[Joshuan Moon]

I see we got a proper thread here so instead of shitting up @Gone Ham's profile page even more I'll take my actually kinda serious question/discussion here.

How to listen to Dolby Surround matrixed LD soundtracks with a modern AVR/surround setup? Does the Dolby Surround mode on modern AVRs do a good job handling matrixed soundtracks?

@tehpope
I've been using a Denon AVD-2000 to pass through the PCM and DD tracks over optical to my AVR but since I started questioning how DSU functions I just recently hooked up the 6 channel analog outs to use the Denon's DPLI processing.

I don't have golden ears and expensive speakers so my concerns are less on the subjective (does this sound good) and more on the objective (does this sound the way it was intended to).

I'll probably give it a try here soon and hear it for myself.

 

[tehpope]

That sounds right. You'll wanna make sure to have the analog audio hooked up too since some LD's (older ones, DTS) have exclusive content on those tracks.

LDDB.com is a great resource btw.

 

[Joshuan Moon]

That sounds right. You'll wanna make sure to have the analog audio hooked up too since some LD's (older ones, DTS) have exclusive content on those tracks.

LDDB.com is a great resource btw.

Yes I found that out first hand on Young Frankenstein (1103-80). It only has an analog soundtrack. Took me a minute or two to figure out why I wasn't getting any sound. Analog's only gonna go out the analog holes of course.

In the vein of this conversation I have my eye on an analog input DPLI processor on ebay for the off chance I want to do the same for thing for an analog track since the AVD-2000 only does digital. But I think that's maybe over doing it a tiny bit. Besides I'm completely out of room for another piece of AV kit.

I'm going to give The Abyss (0896885) a try on the sound check. It's got DD and a Dolby Surround track and I'm betting it leans into actually using the surround effect. First time ever seeing it so that is just a guess.

Update: I watched the majority of the time with 5.1 DD direct to the AVR then DSU that up to 7.1 but I did take the time to listen to the different options. The DPL is surprisingly close to the DD track on the surrounds. The DD has some additional sound placed into the center that DPL wouldn't be able to place there. DSU on the stereo track sounded pretty close on the surrounds as well but I think I noticed some speech briefly bleed in from the front channels on the side surrounds that wasn't there in DPL and DD. I think the DSU surrounds were significantly louder than DD and DPL directly and with twice as many speakers this makes for much louder surrounds overall.

Conclusion: holy crap matrixed stereo really works and all this time I thought old fashioned surround was just faking it. Since everything that was there in the surrounds for DPL was also there for DSU I feel more confident that it is extracting the matrixed surround channel at least somewhat properly. It's probably easiest to just use DSU but it all sounds pretty good so I guess I'll go with my mood on which mode I choose to go with at any particular time.

Also: I can't believe it it's not titled "3 hours of Deus Ex Machina"

 

[Jump]

LD vs a good 4head VCR

VHS can't touch LD's audio options of course.

 

[XYZpdq]

VHS can't touch LD's audio options of course.

iirc VHS could theoretically do two different audio sets via SAP

 

[Quijibo69]

My parents had a huge LD collection. They look like ass if they aren't on a CRT TV. I had one of these as a kid, it skipped a lot:

They almost always had this cused logo at the being:

 

[Jump]

iirc VHS could theoretically do two different audio sets via SAP

VHS recorded audio 2 different ways. Both analog stereo.
The original way was just a linear track along the edge of the tape like a normal cassette player would do. This kinda sucked because of the really slow tape speed. Later they came out with HiFi audio that encoded the audio along side the video signal helically.
SAP got stuck on the legacy LoFi linear track and the normal audio put on the HiFi helical track.
So on VHS you got lofi mono, lofi stereo, or hifi stereo. Analog.

Laserdisc could do digital 5.1 surround.

 

[Joshuan Moon]

iirc VHS could theoretically do two different audio sets via SAP

SAP is a feature for television, which is an RF signal just as laserdisc contains an encoded rf signal. For a television signal there is a band of RF spectrum that is dedicated to each channel. The TV channel contains the NTSC/PAL video signal and then the audio a different RF signal that exists in a defined spot within the band. For RF everything exists in the same physical space simultaneously, you just have to pick out the signals you care about and discard the ones you dont. SAP works by squeezing some extra audio into unused portions of the the allocated RF band for a TV channel.

On VHS I believe the audio and video are recorded directly on the tapes in their unmodulated analog form. The video, left audio, and right audio are physically recorded in differnt positions. To overly simplify, I think it's like how how a stereo audio cassette tape has 4 tracks that are physically located in different positons (2 for each side). But they are not an RF signal, so extra stuff couldn't be added without changing the size of the track itself.

I don't think VHS could have had the same type of "bend the standard to include new features" developments like LD had without actually breaking the format.

If anyone has heard of a tape that uses SAP or has any resources going into how the signals are stored on VHS that contradict my understanding I'd be interested. I would be wrong but I'd also learn something new.

Edit: Somewhat Ninja'd so I'll address that too.

So on VHS you got lofi mono, lofi stereo, or hifi stereo. Analog.

The linear audio track is the key I was missing. I had forgotten that was also present along with the helical data.

So it would be possible to have a second soundtrack in VHS but definitely not on the same level as LD. I'll have to dig up a video about how the hi-fi audio was able to be added on VHS now that I'm curious.

Edit2:

Here's a good brief white paper on the technicals of HiFi audio on tape: https://www.broadcaststore.com/pdf/model/793700/TT190 - 4626.pdf

So as I said they can't do much with the limited physical space. So they didnt (quite) physically squeeze audio in between the video signals like I had assumed. Instead they managed to rape two fm audio tracks into the video signal itself. They chose two carrier frequencies in between the chroma and luminance of the composite video signal and modulated the audio to those frequencies. They then record the audio signals onto the tape at a very high strength and then immediately record over it in a weaker manner with the actual video signal. So you end up with two fm audio tracks hiding ontop of the composite video signal. It looks to me this could have been a PCM audio but since the source was going to be analog anyway it wouldn't make sense for a recordable format to use PCM (in the home, at the time)

Fascinating stuff!

 

[Travoltron]

I hate VHS. I was trying to digitize some old videos of mine and I just can't get it to look good. There's always sections where the tracking goes wonky.
Maybe if VCR repairmen were still a thing, I could get a better result.

 

[Shroom King]

How to listen to Dolby Surround matrixed LD soundtracks with a modern AVR/surround setup? Does the Dolby Surround mode on modern AVRs do a good job handling matrixed soundtracks?

The Marantz AV9000 seems to be what you are looking for. It does AC-3, so I assume it must also do old-school 4-channel Dolby Surround. Also has both s-video and composite in and out.

All modern receivers with Dolby Surround are allegedly able to process old school Pro Logic, but many, many threads on audiophile forums suggest otherwise. DTS seems to be more straightforward (if you have LDs using DTS for the digital surround tracks).

https://www.marantz.com/en-us/product/hi-fi-components/av9000

Currently going for 200 EUR on ebay.

 

[Joshuan Moon]

The Marantz AV9000 seems to be what you are looking for. It does AC-3, so I assume it must also do old-school 4-channel Dolby Surround. Also has both s-video and composite in and out.

All modern receivers with Dolby Surround are allegedly able to process old school Pro Logic, but many, many threads on audiophile forums suggest otherwise. DTS seems to be more straightforward (if you have LDs using DTS for the digital surround tracks).

https://www.marantz.com/en-us/product/hi-fi-components/av9000

Currently going for 200 EUR on ebay.

I've been in lurk mode for some time and haven't been looking at this thread so I missed this reply! Curious to see your thoughts on what's best. That AVD-2000 does work really well. For the most part I've been sticking with not worrying about it and letting DSU on my modern receiver handle it. In general it seems to do an ok job but recently I noticed it had really badly separated surrounds in a few scenes with engine noises in the mix.

Would you stick with the DPLI output of the AVD-2000 for matrixed audio? My understanding is that 3 channel Dolby surround didn't really last long in the home and that the center channel in DPLI is just the matching portions from L and R channels redirected to a center channel. Ideally, two stereo speakers playing the same thing would give the impression of sound being in the middle. That's fine if you are centered between your stero speakers but if you go even slightly offset then your perception of "center" will shift away from the center of the screen. By creating a center channel you aren't adding anything new but you are creating a fixed center that doesn't move around with viewing position. So DPLI seem to me like it would be the most "authentic".

As to your comment on DTS, it is not safe from the same confusion dolby has. There exists a DTS flavor of matrixed stereo soundtracks as well that exists on LD in addition to the discrete digital DTS.

In any case another AVR is out of the question for my setup. My most recent retro video struggles have been focused on finding a suitable video processors/scaler. The challenge lies in my need for closed captioning decoding which made things incredibly annoying and difficult. I'll definitely be venting my frustrations with that affair in the near future. Everyone can look forward to that rant.

 

[Shroom King]

Would you stick with the DPLI output of the AVD-2000 for matrixed audio? My understanding is that 3 channel Dolby surround didn't really last long in the home and that the center channel in DPLI is just the matching portions from L and R channels redirected to a center channel.

Odd, I got a notification for this today. Anyway, I can't recall any LDs using a native 3 channel surround setup (that doesn't mean they don't exist, it is just I never seen any). As an aside, I heard claims that a couple of Atari 2600 games have native 3 channel audio (but it's a moot point since the 2600 only outputs audio in mono over RF).

I've been using a Denon AVD-2000 to pass through the PCM and DD tracks over optical to my AVR but since I started questioning how DSU functions I just recently hooked up the 6 channel analog outs to use the Denon's DPLI processing.

Update: I watched the majority of the time with 5.1 DD direct to the AVR then DSU that up to 7.1 but I did take the time to listen to the different options.

Looking at the manual, it looks like the AVD-2000 will output the single Surround channel as a dual mono to the Left and Right Surrounds when in Pro Logic mode. I think you might be able to bullshit your AVR into giving you a more accurate DPLI 4 channel sound by connecting the L/R Surrounds on the multi-channel out to the L/R Surround Backs on your AVR, and only rock the multi-channel out function on the AVD-2000 when using DPLI. As you stated you send digital audio to your AVR over optical so this shouldn't interfere with your 5.1 mixes. I would let the AVD-2000 decode DPLI since it was designed for it, and let your AVR do the d/a conversion on 5.1 DD and higher since it most likely has a more advanced DAC than the AVD-2000.

The challenge lies in my need for closed captioning decoding which made things incredibly annoying and difficult.

I have no experience with this, but I believe CC is hard coded on the disc's different analog tracks, and I would think decoding is done by the laserdisc player itself.