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Topic: Best Floorstanding L/R + Center Speakers for Compressed, Lossy DVD/BD Audio?  (Read 4547 times) previous topic - next topic
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Best Floorstanding L/R + Center Speakers for Compressed, Lossy DVD/BD Audio?


Budget: ~ $8K

If you're a vintage DVD/BD movie collector like me you're likely to have been less than thrilled by the audio quality of lots of discs in your collection. I'm especially talking about movies from the mid 1940s through the mid 90s. Of course, there are a small handful of blessed exceptions, all BD editions: "Double Indemnity" (1944); "Whirlpool" (1949); "North by Northwest" (1959); "Collector" (1965); "PJ" (1967); "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (1972); "Conversation" (1974); "Love & Death on Long Island" (1996)

But if you do own such titles produced between those five decades don't many sound compressed-and possibly with a somewhat noisy high end, if there is much HF response at all? Any other aspects about the sound which you often find troublesome?

So, if you have spent at least $4K or more on L/R speakers-and maybe also $1K or so on a center speaker-then on a scale of 3 to 10, with 10 being most satisfied, how do most of your oldest or most of your DVD and BD movie titles sound to you?

Please share make/model of those speakers.

Re: Best Floorstanding L/R + Center Speakers for Compressed, Lossy DVD/BD Audio?

Reply #1 –


Quote
I'm especially talking about movies from the mid 1940s through the mid 90s. Of course, there are a small handful of blessed exceptions, all BD editions: "Double Indemnity" (1944); "Whirlpool" (1949); "North by Northwest" (1959); "Collector" (1965); "PJ" (1967); "Colossus: The Forbin Project" (1972); "Conversation" (1974); "Love & Death on Long Island" (1996)
Of course most of those were analog and before surround sound, or even stereo.   The technology just wasn't as good.

There's probably a lot that can be done with AI (or it will probably soon be possible with AI) and then it will depend on if the copyright owners think they'll make money remastering and re-releasing the movies.

My speakers are DYI, and I'm satisfied with them...

Re: Best Floorstanding L/R + Center Speakers for Compressed, Lossy DVD/BD Audio?

Reply #2 –
Going from the 40's to 90's.  I use the center channel for mono films.  The front two for stereo films and TV shows, Dolby Pro Logic or Dolby Pro Logic II in movie mode for the films that used Dolby Stereo and Dolby Surround formats.  5.1 Surround Sound for Dolby Digital and DTS formats.  The films where you're going to get the most out of any discrete 5.1 Surround Sound system in this case will be in mid to late 1990's.  There is quite a few films of the 1970's and 1980's well into 1990's where you benefit from having the Dolby Pro Logic decoder switched on and number of 1990's TV shows had Dolby Surround encoding as well.  The films where you won't get much use out of your Surround Sound system at all will be from the 1940's through to 1970's and even a little bit into the 80's.  When you get into the 2000's 5.1 Surround Sound is pretty much the standard for almost all films released in theaters with some high budget films briefly using 6.1 Surround System but most TV shows of that decade didn't really utilize anything more than Dolby Surround at most for quite a while and a lot of shows even today are still regular stereo or in some rarer cases mono.  The thing with super old films is that if your TV speakers are good enough, you won't benefit much from better speakers because the sound in those films is quite bad a lot of times.

As for the best speakers, I can't make any recommendations.  You have to audition them yourself.  The main factors should be build quality, durability, and most importantly sound quality.  How they sound to you in the room you're listening to them is also important.