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Live albums and dynamic compression: CD versus DVD

darrenyeats

pfm Member
As a public service... The following live albums are mastered with far less dynamic compression on DVD than on the corresponding CD for the same concert. (I have ripped the audio from the DVD and I listen to that now! They're great!)

Portishead, Roseland New York
Jeff Beck, Performing this Week... Live at Ronnie Scott's
Alice in Chains, Unplugged

The following showed no difference between the CD and DVD:

Kraftwerk, Minimum - Maximum

As examples, see the screenshots below. In each case top waveform DVD, bottom CD.
Darren


Alice in Chains - Heaven Beside You
a2asusen.jpg










Jeff Beck - Big Block
umy2epu7.jpg
 
Do you mean the first pair of waveforms is the dvd, second pair is cd... If thats the case then the CD version has a lot more compression.
Otherwise (as above) not much difference.

Sam
 
How did the Portishead do?
Tony,
I don't have a waveform pic for CD for that particular one (Spotify). But I can hear the extra compression easily so I believe it would be very obvious next to the waveform for DVD (which I have obviously).
Darren
 
I can't see a lot of difference, what am I missing?

Phil

Phil,
These are stereo waveforms.

There are just two songs in total. For each song, two channels (Left/Right) of DVD are shown above two channels (Left/Right) of CD. I've edited the original post to make the separation clearer! Thanks,
Darren
 
Interesting. I presume in all cases the DVDs were outputting a PCM 16/44.1 signal at the very least (rather than Dobbly-Digital or DTS)?
I can't think of any live albums for which I have both the DVD and CD.
 
As a public service... The following live albums are mastered with far less dynamic compression on DVD than on the corresponding CD for the same concert. (I have ripped the audio from the DVD and I listen to that now! They're great!)

Portishead, Roseland New York
Jeff Beck, Performing this Week... Live at Ronnie Scott's
Alice in Chains, Unplugged
I now add:
Dire Straits, On The Night.
 
It's brilliant? Actually not the best Private Investigations (Alchemy's is better but then I think the studio version is the best anyway) but otherwise my favourite DS live performance. Romeo and Juliet is stunning, especially on DVD. The guitar playing has a gorgeously subtle country twang in many places.

I know you were kidding BTW ...!
 
I've ripped all my music dvds/Blurays and of the few I've managed to compare the dvd rips always sound better. I recently compared a cd rip of One Night Only to my bluray rip and the latter won hands down.
 


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