As I work towards archiving my music collection to my network, I'm wondering the best way to deal with these discs.
It's been a while since I've pulled any of these out for a listen. These discs were sourced from quad mixes, and have a center channel. As I recall, the center channel was added to them, without altering the front left and right channels.
To me this would mean, the ideal way to listen to these discs would be to drop the center channel from them. Is this correct? Is the center channel just adding unnecessary information that would be messing with the l-r soundfield? Or is it improving things? Or is it just there?
I question this because, I could just rip the DTS to stereo flac, and those will playback fine. Or, I could convert to 5.1 wav, delete the center channel, and then save back to 5.1 flac. Which would be bigger than the 2.0 flac with encoded DTS, but would then not have the unnecessary center channel. Or, I could remove the center, and re-encode to DTS, and save that as flac....but then would decoding dts and re-encoding dts negatively effect the audio? I'm thinking once I decode the dts, I don't want to go back to dts.
I don't know. As usual, I'm overthinking this, but I do need to make a decision, so I figured I'd check in with others thoughts. Do I leave well enough alone and leave the derived center in? Or do I go with a format that will take a bit more disc space to eliminate the unnecessary center?
It's been a while since I've pulled any of these out for a listen. These discs were sourced from quad mixes, and have a center channel. As I recall, the center channel was added to them, without altering the front left and right channels.
To me this would mean, the ideal way to listen to these discs would be to drop the center channel from them. Is this correct? Is the center channel just adding unnecessary information that would be messing with the l-r soundfield? Or is it improving things? Or is it just there?
I question this because, I could just rip the DTS to stereo flac, and those will playback fine. Or, I could convert to 5.1 wav, delete the center channel, and then save back to 5.1 flac. Which would be bigger than the 2.0 flac with encoded DTS, but would then not have the unnecessary center channel. Or, I could remove the center, and re-encode to DTS, and save that as flac....but then would decoding dts and re-encoding dts negatively effect the audio? I'm thinking once I decode the dts, I don't want to go back to dts.
I don't know. As usual, I'm overthinking this, but I do need to make a decision, so I figured I'd check in with others thoughts. Do I leave well enough alone and leave the derived center in? Or do I go with a format that will take a bit more disc space to eliminate the unnecessary center?
