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[Kendrix]

I posted this with Brads mastering forum  - but wanted to poll the guru's here as well.
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Can someone tell me why this is?

I recently bought a DVD player that does DVD-Audio.
I also recently bought a DAC1 converter.

One of the first DVD-A discs I bought is S. Dans latest.
I also own it on CD. I was interested to compare the sound of the two so i fed the digital out of my CD player into the optical input of the DAC-1. I also fed the DVD-A stereo mix to the coaxial inputs on the DAC-1. Then i switched the inputs on the Dac-1 to toggle between the two sources. The DVD was outputting 192/24bit. The signals then went thru an adacom power amp driving Bose 901'S (this is in my family room not my studio)

I expected to hear more depth- perhaps better imaging and, perhaps, some subtle differences in tone/timbre with the DVD-A.
I note that both the CD and the DVD-A were mastered by the same person at Sony Studios.

What I got was a drastic difference between the two.
The DVD seemed as if it was mastered completely differently. The lows were deeper/more extended and the highs on the DVD were much smoother - not as strident.
The EQ curves seemed to not even be close to one another.

Why would this be? Perhaps the DVD stereo mix is some derivative of the surrond mix rather than being a clone of the CD stereo mix? Even if so, why would the same mastering engineer cause them to end up in such different states?

In any case, the DVD version was much more balanced and listenable IMHO.

[Nika Aldrich]

There are many reasons that this may be the case.  I think the most likely is pressure from the label to have the two sound different intentionally.  Other reasons might be the use of oversampled processing along the way and distortion in your playback system at the presentation of high frequency content that exceeds the linear range of your amps.

Nika.

[Loco]

They may have taken advantage of a greater dynamic range on the DVD. Too bad roger is not around to answer that. You can try at his site, though.

[Kendrix]

The plot thickens.

I also now own both DVD-A and CD versions of Tommy.
These two sources were very similar in tone/timbre ( although the DVD showed much better inner detail/imaging and dynamics- as expected).

So, the large disparity between the DVD and CD on the S. Dan disc was definately the result of the mastering.
It was not caused by some quirk/shortcoming of the equipment.

[Roland Storch]

"I also fed the DVD-A stereo mix to the coaxial inputs on the DAC-1."


As far as I know there is no way to get a 24/192 PCM signal out of the DVD-A player. That?s because of copy protection. The only way to hear the 24/192 PCM signal is to use the analog outputs of the DVD-A palyer, meaning to use the internal DAC.

I guess the signal you got on the digital out was converted to probably 16/48.

Even if you got the original 24/192 PCM signal (but you don?t) on the digital out the sound were probably different because of different mastering. The loudness race on DVD is not yet as far as on CD and you?d hear probably less limiting and less compression than on CD.