Surroundablog

Metallica DVD-A and a "Black" day for the cats...

This article could be sub-titled "The day I introduced my cats to SENSURROUND"......! For those of you who weren't a mid 70's disaster film fan, the "sensurround" effect was introduced in the film "Earthquake"..a "B" movie gem that put to screen the terror of a massive slip along California's San Andreas fault. While L.A. was in the throws of an earthquake...the cameraman shook the frame...and the audience not so much heard as "FELT" the destruction. The phenomena resulted in "Earthquake" winning an Oscar for "Best Sound". What we didn't know then was that we had just experienced the full-on sub-woofer effect.

Fast forward 30 years to yesterday afternoon. In searching my library of dvds to review I decided to grab Metallica's "Black" album. It seemed like a timely pick as the band prepares to release their documentary "Some Kind of Monster" on July the 9th.

As an aside, it was also an attempt to get my stinking cats to stop using the grills of my reference series Klipsch speakers for scratching posts......#$%*#&*%#(*($#%*$#$&$$@#$#@....!

Alan Parsons "On Air" DTS

Aviation history was made yesterday when a privately financed group of engineers managed to put a man into space. With that said, I guess Alan Parsons will have to add an extra track to "On Air"...

Before we get ahead of ourselves, Alan Parsons crafted this concept album detailing man's quest for the heavens. Released in 2002, "On Air", was not his or his Project's greatest of efforts. It does; however, sound quite fetching in DTS 5.1 surround sound. In this album, Alan Parsons tackles subjects ranging from the mythic Icarus and the visionary Da Vinci, into wartime tragedy, free falling, fear of flying and the Challenger disaster. Thought provoking...

High Performance Audio...its a thing...explained...

I'll try to guide you the maze of these formats with both the geek explanations and my own simple-minded vocab. Hey....scrabble was never one of my strong board games...we Ukrainians learned crib dagnabit....

What is DAD?
The Classic 24/96 Digital Audio Disc DAD™ is designed to be an audiophile musical reference. The process starts with the encoding of an analog signal from a live microphone feed or more commonly from an analog master tape. The highly sophisticated Analog to Digital converter (A to D) samples the analog signal 96,000 times per second (96kHz) and assigns a numerical value to each sample point. The 96kHz sampling rate is more than twice the 44,100 (44.1kHz) sampling rate used on standard CD's......wow, if you're still reading this I'm impressed...

In a nutshell, DAD offers the listener an expanded dynamic range over traditional analog recordings. The low frequencies will be deeper and the highs will shimmer. DAD releases are sourced directly from the original analog master tapes. Oftentimes; new recordings are recorded in digital in the first place...and are thus transferred into DAD seamlessly. DAD releases are stereo (2 channel) and can be played on any DVD player. They will not play in a regular cd player.