Disclord
900 Club - QQ All-Star
That 3D link was wonderful - one thing it didn't mention is that most of the new 3D films are not 3D at all - they are poorly done conversions, such as "Clash Of The Titans", and are not at all representative of what 'true' 3D looks like. Yet ignorant reviewers pounce all over them as to "why 3D doesn't work." And even companies like Dolby are spewing the same nonsense about how "3D is now perfected" and "Isn't anything like the 'old' bad 3D of the 50's!" Of course, Dolby isn't anything like what it used to be - it's now just a company that buys technology and slaps the Dolby name on it. As I mentioned elsewhere, Dolby doesn't do hardly any basic research anymore, and even the 'old guard' are moving on - Roger Dressler left Dolby and now works for SRS Labs. Things must have been pretty bad there for him to leave - he LOVED the place.
Regarding Neural and such... the true experts in matrix and logic steering design are all getting old and retiring - and no one is passing on their knowledge. Even Jim Fosgate is gone from the industry and as we all know, he was THE STAR of matrix technology in general. Without him the Audionics Space & Image Composer wouldn't have made it to market because Fosgate figured out how to replace the missing Directional Control Interface on the otherwise useless Tate IC's - and he got Ray Dolby to the CES demo where he (Dolby) licensed the Tate that same day. Until Lexicon came along with the all-digital CP-1 and Shure with the HTS-5000, there was not a single Dolby licensed MP decoder available on the consumer market that had logic steering. Fosgate was it - and I believe that, for years, Fosgate decoders were the only ones that had a stereo-surround mode.
As a side-note, I see that Peter Scheiber has been claiming for the past 5 years or so that Fosgate "stole" Pro-Logic II from him - and he bases that claim on the fact that he had a design for stereo surrounds that Fosgate used in all his earlier decoders. It isn't true at all - the issue for Pro-Logic II isn't the fact that it has stereo surrounds, it's the feedback servo system in the logic side-chain. ALL of Scheiber's designs/patents are for standard feed-forward designs - there's not even a hint of an idea for a feedback design until Fosgate patented what became PL-II. And Scheiber has lost all his recent court cases, so he obviously doesn't have much of a claim. Nor is improving an already patented idea against the law - that's done all the time and it's perfectly legal and within an inventors right. The whole thing has made Scheiber a really bitter man - and broke because he did something really stupid - he fought his own cases and, instead of investing his limited royalty income in more patents or in cultivating more licencee's, he funneled all his money into lawsuits against Dolby and others. Not a smart move.
DTS Neo:6 has gone through a lot of changes since its introduction - mainly because of what I mentioned above - the lack of engineers who really understand logic designs. And Neo:6 is doing something no other decoder had done except for the Sansui QSD-1, and that's steer in multiple bands - 9 and up in the various Neo designs. Tag Mclaren (SP?) used to let owners know when DTS changed the Neo specs and would send them DSP updates to upgrade their Neo decoders. That was cool.
Pro-Logic II's artifacts really bother me - as I said, it sounds SOOOOO slow! You should never hear sounds moving to their proper location - especially since PL-II has a look-ahead delay. Yet I've heard it from every PL-II decoder I've had the chance to audition. I haven't heard newer "X" and "Z" versions, so I don't know if Dolby has changed the logic behavior. The attack/decay times of a logic decoder are some of the trickiest parameters to get right - even sophisticated multi-band noise reduction, like Dolby SR, was probably easier to design. With Logic, there's no one setting that will work all the time and with all types of music - it's trial and error, with HUGE amounts of listening.
The Shure Acra-Vector was a broadband decoder, but it had the capability of recognizing and decoding two orthogonal directions at once - something no other broadband decoder has, even today. And since it always outputs a full cancellation signal to the VCA's, it enhances low-level dialog and effects with much more accuracy and stability than other designs - others reduce the amount of logic action as the input level drops, causing low-level sounds to start to spread out, until the logic switches off. Its phantom imaging decoding, like Left Center, is also phenomenal - rock solid imaging that stays in place even as other sounds appear. Pro-Logic I and II can't do that - in fact, both are optimized for decoding at speaker locations, with the in-between phantoms just approximated. The ability to decode phantoms better than Dolby, decode simultaneous opposite directions as well as steer very low-level sounds were all specific design goals of the Shure Acra-Vector's inventor Stephen Julstrom. I'd love to hear the Acra-Vector adapted to SQ and QS.
If you are interested, I'll send you Shure's AES paper about the decoder as well as a copy of the patent and brochure for the HTS-5300. It's wonderful how cheap they are now - one person on eBay is selling 2 of the 5300's for, I believe, around $80 - 80 bucks for 2 decoders - what a deal!
I'm now waiting for an Aphex ESP-7000 to show up on eBay for a reasonable price. I also want to find a Synergex unit - it's a very 'odd' decoder, that was only sold through custom installers. Except for a review in The Perfect Vision, I've never come across one anywhere else - so I want to find one for my collection. My house looks like a Goodwill with all the old electronics I've bought - and to make matters worse, the front living room and dining room is now taken up with shelves and shelves of Tony's HO-Scale trains as well as a huge HO train layout. His website has become the largest HO Scale train website online and won all kinds of awards from the model railroad magazines - he was even the consultant for a Canadian documentary about the old NBC show "Supertrain" because he has the largest private collection of Supertrain stuff.
Our collections just grow and grow...
