Dolby Surround CD's - What's Your Latest?

[DuncanS]

Thought I'd lost this Motown music disc ........but hey found it when looking for something else , good thing I must say.

Good tunes.

There are some great tracks on that disc

 

[watsontr]

Thought I'd lost this Motown music disc ........but hey found it when looking for something else , good thing I must say.

Good tunes.

So does this mean that Band of Gold was mixed in quad? Was there an album?

 

[fredblue]

So does this mean that Band of Gold was mixed in quad? Was there an album?

afaik there was sadly no Quad of Freda Payne.

these Motorcity Chartbusters Dolby Surround CDs are new recordings and not the originals from the 60's and 70's.

the solo numbers are by the original artists or as by those artists as listed and according to the rear inlay, the group songs have "as many of the original group members as possible".

the arrangements themselves for the most part aren't bad and most of the vocal performances are very good.. there's a dreaded cheapness to some of the electronic/synthetic drums, strings, etc. which if you can listen beyond that these are enjoyable recreations. they will never replace the Motown original recordings of course and a few tracks are a pretty poor substitute but by and large the discs are a lot of fun and great from a surround point of view since most of the tracks decode excellently through Dolby PLII Music, with a great sense of separation. Recommended

 

[watsontr]

afaik there was sadly no Quad of Freda Payne.

Thanks Fred/Adam. I didn't recall anything by her being in quad

 

[oxenholme]

I'd give anything to hear Nathan Jones in surround!

Assuming it's the right disc - it looks like it in the pic on Discogs - it's on its way to me, very cheaply indeed at less than 2 Euros, from Finland.
When It arrives I'll have to figure out a way of playing it.
Is there a way of translating Dolby Surround into 5.1 flac on the computer?

 

[fredblue]

Assuming it's the right disc - it looks like it in the pic on Discogs - it's on its way to me, very cheaply indeed at less than 2 Euros, from Finland.
When It arrives I'll have to figure out a way of playing it.
Is there a way of translating Dolby Surround into 5.1 flac on the computer?

fwiw they're not the original Motown versions but "all new" re-recordings (by mostly the original artists) that to me sound like they were done on the cheap with few if any real instruments.. but they're good fun with some decent vocals and most tracks give a great surround effect in PLII Music. i imagine they'd be alright through a Surround Master in Involve mode as well but tbh i never checked.

 

[fizzywiggs41]

Assuming it's the right disc - it looks like it in the pic on Discogs - it's on its way to me, very cheaply indeed at less than 2 Euros, from Finland.
When It arrives I'll have to figure out a way of playing it.
Is there a way of translating Dolby Surround into 5.1 flac on the computer?

Yeah , basically it's a cheap type of music in surround for that label.........but some of those artists are just not available in surround.

 

[surround.sound.enthusiast]

It's a good one with the Surround Master. The Pink Panther album by Henry Mancini in Dolby Surround is even better with the Surround Master.

Thanks to all for the heads up on the Macini Dolby Surround discs! I love Mancini's style, and have bought all of the Dutton-Vocalion releases. Now I've two more discs to look for.

 

[oxenholme]

It's a good one with the Surround Master. The Pink Panther album by Henry Mancini in Dolby Surround is even better with the Surround Master.

So if I were to manage somehow to get a Surround Master to England I would be feeding 2 channel analogue sound into it from the Oppo 2 channel output as it plays the RCA Dolby Surround CD, having passed through the Oppo DAC; it would be converted to digital for surround sound synthesis and then through another DAC and the resultant 5.1 analogue output fed into one of the sets of 5.1 inputs to my Parasound P7. The intended Dolby Prologic won't have been used.

And no doubt sounding good as you say.

But is it really impossible to convert from a Dolby Surround CD to 5.1 flac? And similarly with DTS CDs (not DTS DVDs) (e.g. Venus And Mars) is it impossible to convert to 5.1 flac?

 

[bmoura]

Correct. The Surround Master takes the 2 channel Dolby Surround encoded Mancini album and decodes it into 4 Channel Surround Sound.
As a bonus, it splits the original Dolby Surround encoded mono surround channel into separate LR and RR channels. A big improvement over decoding this CD with a Pro Logic decoder.

Once it has been split into 4 channels, you could convert that into a 4.0 or 5.0 FLAC file for playback with a DAC, DAP or optical disc player.

 

[Soundfield]

So if I were to manage somehow to get a Surround Master to England ...

You imply you think it might be difficult for some reason - it isn't, several of us UK based QQers are very happy owners!

 

[Circular Vibes]

I suspect it has more to do with Her Majesty's guaranteed income from imports.

 

[humprof]

Is there an AA3 script for Dolby? Actually, could someone please let me know just what AA3 decoding scripts are available in the wild for surround decoding? I'm out of work so may have some time for fooling with such things, Once I've flogged Abbey Road to bits that is

Maybe this should be the start of a new thread, but does anyone have an answer for @watsontr 's question? Are there in fact any (freely available, consumer-grade) software decode scripts for the "old" Dolby Surround? All I'm finding is SurCode, which is standalone commercial software that looks to have a $600 price tag.

I ask because I'm thinking of retiring the last AVR in my possession with a built-in PLII circuit, and I have a handful of Dolby Surround discs that I'd still like to be able to listen to. (As we've established, the "new," post-2014 Dolby Surround DSP is effectively an Atmos upmixer, not a PLII decoder, and consequently newer AVRs don't decode Dolby Surround CDs properly.) The only other solution I'm seeing right now is to run these discs through my old AVR using PLII, "record them in" to my computer, and save the files as 5.1 FLACs (or burn them to DVD-Rs). But such a DAD conversion--I'm assuming it would be DAD, unless I can use HDMI rather than RCA cables to record in?--seems sort of inefficient, not to mention conducive to signal deterioration.

Here's another, only tangentially related question. Let's say I get a copy of the soundtrack of the VHS--or maybe the Japanese Laserdisc--of the movie version of Tom Waits's Big Time. Like the unofficial DVD-V release, which is rare as hen's teeth, these are reputed to be encoded in Dolby Surround, but I don't know if that's ever been confirmed. So my question is: how could I tell for sure? If I play it back with Dolby PLII and it sounds good, that might mean it's encoded--or it might just mean that the PLIIx or PLIIz circuit is doing a convincing job of "up-converting" it.

 

[J. PUPSTER]

Maria Muldaur - (it's her gravelly voice!) We'll see how this sounds through the SMv2

 

[4-earredwonder]

Maria Muldaur - (it's her gravelly voice!) We'll see how this sounds through the SMv2

View attachment 44195

Looks very promising, Pupster as long as her wonderful gravelly voice isn't grating to your sensitive puppy ears!

 

[surround.sound.enthusiast]

At the end of November, prompted by the prior posts about Mancini in Dolby Surround, I picked up this whole swathe of Dolby Surround discs. Many were discovered through the liner notes of "Also Available", and the two non-Mancini's must have been sitting on the Bullmoose shelves just waiting for me, because it was by shear chance that I happened to take them off the shelves in the first place:



A lot of these may be ambient surround, but they'll be worth finding out when I'm able to.

 

[bmoura]

At the end of November, prompted by the prior posts about Mancini in Dolby Surround, I picked up this whole swathe of Dolby Surround discs. Many were discovered through the liner notes of "Also Available", and the two non-Mancini's must have been sitting on the Bullmoose shelves just waiting for me, because it was by shear chance that I happened to take them off the shelves in the first place:

View attachment 44630 View attachment 44631 View attachment 44632 View attachment 44633

A lot of these may be ambient surround, but they'll be worth finding out when I'm able to.

The Mancini Dolby Surround CDs aren't ambient for the most part. And they really shine with the Involve Audio Surround Master decoder.
Since it takes the standard Dolby Surround encoded mono surround track and splits it into separate Right and Left Surround channels!

 

[Beefalo]

Andreas Vollenweider
Discogs has several described as multichannel Dolby surround CD. Anyone heard these?
I remember liking one of his 80's releases.

 

[surround.sound.enthusiast]

The Mancini Dolby Surround CDs aren't ambient for the most part.
And they really shine with the Involve Audio Surround Master decoder. Since it takes the standard Dolby Surround encoded mono surround track and splits it into separate Right and Left Surround channels!

Oh, fantastic! Because some liner notes say: "...assembled from three concert albums...recorded for RCA Victor in 1964, 1967, and 1971." and "Newly remixed from two-, three- and four-track tapes for Dolby Surround." I assumed ambient.
I look forward to playing these more now. I wondered how monaural rear channel Dolby Surround would sound through Pro Logic II, or as you mention, the Surround Master.

 

[bmoura]

Oh, fantastic! Because some liner notes say: "...assembled from three concert albums...recorded for RCA Victor in 1964, 1967, and 1971." and "Newly remixed from two-, three- and four-track tapes for Dolby Surround." I assumed ambient.
I look forward to playing these more now. I wondered how monaural rear channel Dolby Surround would sound through Pro Logic II, or as you mention, the Surround Master.

Pro Logic II, as developed by Jim Fosgate, was also designed to split the Dolby Surround encoded Mono Surround Channel.
But I think you will find the results from the Surround Master are superior to Pro Logic II. That has been my experience with the Mancini Dolby Surround CDs.