Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Systems DVD vs Blu-ray in Practice (was HD621)

Incidentally, Sky HD channels viewed via SCART (576i) usually look a lot better than their SD counterparts, which just goes to show that PAL is actually capable of very good results (though not as good as native HD) when the theoretical bandwidth available to the PAL format is not compromised by MPEG compression. The Sky Sports channels are a good example.

There are exceptions to this as certain Sky HD channels show horrendous MPEG blocking.

Not sure what PAL has got to do with this? Short of seeing a true analogue broadcast, PAL is not involved.

PAL is colour encoding not the TV format although it is sometimes incorrectly labelled as such - ie PAL DVD's are not PAL, the term PAL is simply an incorrect shorthand to describing the frame rate and number of lines.

It may frighten people, but composite video is capable incredible results too. When I was at the BBC 15-20 years ago, the majority of our computer graphics output was via composite backbones simply because RGB was too expensive (and suffered timing/skew issues due to the long transmission lengths) to pipe around TV Centre. I think we ran 5 composite feeds and 1 RGB feed from our paintboxes and short of using a scope or having to use a matt/CSO (chroma key) with an unfriendly colour, you could not tell the difference even with grade 1 monitors short of an A/B test when differences were minimal and then you fixed the problem with a fringe suppressor to clean up the edge of the matt.

the only way this will be settled is when the mothership release a br player ,but i think meridians got something else up his sleeve !!

I'm pretty sure of it. But will it be affordable?

for the "high rollers" for sure

Chris

I`m with Mark_H on this one

The analogy I would use is DVD-A versus CD

With CD, I think Meridian is capable of truly impressive results when utilizing Player Upsampling and RE of 16/44 material to 24/88 and then using MHR and Jitter Minimization along the rest of the chain (all the way to the speakers in some cases)

However, after listening to just a few High Res discs (first DVD-V 24/96 and then DVD-A) I quickly realised that the extra Resolution, Headroom and Detail available from High Res material resulted in a more enjoyable listening experience.

I then bought as many High Res discs as I could find, and compared many of the 2-channel High Res Tracks with their CD Equivalents. In perhaps 15-20% of cases, the High Res Tracks did not optimize the format and only sounded a little better than their CD equivalents. However, in most cases (80%+), the differences between the 2-channel High Res track and the CD was Profound and easily superior. The result: A far more enjoyable listening experience

Likewise, with Bluray. In any back to back comparison of a Bluray disc with its DVD equivalent that I have done, the video performance from the Bluray was again easy to differentiate. On the screen, there is typically much more detail and depth (of field and colour) and this, along with far less artefacts and noise than from its DVD equivalent, makes a Bluray disc easy to differentiate from DVD

As regards Bluray Audio, is it any wonder that the 24bit/48 (4,096+ kbps) Lossless Track on many Bluray`s will sound noticeably superior to the 16bit/48 (448kbps) Lossy Track available on DVD??? I mean is that even a discussion??? That`s akin to saying that 128kbps MP3 sounds the same as 24/96 DVD-A material?? Just not the case IMHO.

Personally, I can still listen to CD`s and watch DVD`s as their CONTENT is always king, (and I have not been able to buy their Higher Res equivalent.) However, I would never say that they Sound or Look the “same” as e.g. DVD-A or Bluray, as that simply isn`t the case for the vast majority of discs

The Economics and Available Catalog issues of Bluray are valid, but are not relevant to the issue of performance IMHO. If my 10-year old can see a difference with Bluray (and Sky HD channels), then I strongly suspect that most here can.