Opeth - Pale Communion 5.1 (Blu-ray)

Wildman said:

Try setting your LFE/Bass out to front. That's what did it for me.

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How would I do that? Set rears to small and front 3 to large? I assume that would send all bass freq to the fronts only? Or is there a different way?

On my Yamaha, it's in the speaker setup menu. It gives you the choice of sending the LFE to the sub out, front, or both.

I only get the bass back when set to front.

Wildman said:

On my Yamaha, it's in the speaker setup menu. It gives you the choice of sending the LFE to the sub out, front, or both.

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Damn, my Sony doesn't appear to have that feature.

If you have it set for no sub, you might have to enable it for it to show.

Looking at my menu, that setting is what switches from sub to no sub. Try changing any of the settings that affect the sub and see if the bass comes in on any of them. If not, you may not be able to make this disk work on your system.

I've already got my amp set as no sub and it just distributes the LFE channel to all remaining speakers.

Dang, you might be the first one that won't be able to find a workaround for this. I think we can now definitely say that this disk has a compatability issue.

Simon_LDT said:

Listening again just now. Have tried setting my player to LPCM and switched back and forth from bitstream and it sounds identical to me. I've got all the DRC and all processing turned off on the amp so I can only assume the DolbyTrueHD is being decoded properly.

It's still bass light to me, especially compared to the stereo mix (which is also DolbyTrueHD so it can't be the container that's a problem). All my speakers are set to large (no sub currently).

Those with full range or larger rear speakers, is there mid/low bass coming from them? My rears are quite tiny, no sure exactly on how low they go but they are very small surround bookshelf speakers and that could be my problem. However, I'm still confused as to why the stereo has real grunt on my system (and my fronts only go down to around 52hz) yet on the surround the bass is there but has lost all power and depth. It's like a ghost of it's former self.

It still sounds great, just wish it had a bit more bite in the lower end. I shall have to revisit it once I upgrade my rears and/or get a sub. I assume if the LFE is quite low mixed, those with active subs can up the volume a tad to compensate?

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52Hz is heaps low enough for most types of music (imho.. unless you're a sucker for a church organ or loads of doof doof doof drum n bass!)..

what manufacturers don't always tell you is what their speakers actually output at sub-80Hz levels..

i.e. even if a speakers pretty flat from say 150Hz to 1kHz and theoretically extends down to 52Hz, how loud is reproduction at 52Hz? there could be a bass hump from 80 to 150 that's compensating for lack of low end grunt.. and lower than 80 it's filtered in the speakers own crossover so the speaker just can't reproduce.. and so how many dB's lower output is at these lower frequencies is up for grabs and more often than not speakers (especially those with the "WAF") aren't capable of reproducing <80hz stuff all that well.. for bookshelf or standmounters it's normally much cop, for obvious physical limitations.. and the argument for increased headroom (especially in multichannel receivers) gained by freeing up the power-hungry lower frequencies and offloading them to a sub or subs..

now what this doesn't touch on is why by running your 5.1 speakers as Large with a sub you'd get bigger or fuller bass than the recommended Small setting with an 80hz crossover.. I'm not saying just because it's working fine on some QQ-ers setups (mine included) with speakers as "Small" and 80Hz Xover that there's anything inherently wrong with anyone's setup, we recently have had a series of reviews from QQ member Mike The Fish where bass and other missing elements on R.E.M. DVD-A's was a real issue.. I tried to help out in my own little way but I don't think we got very far, there are many variables from each person's setup to the next person's setup.. it is all unnecessarily complicated and has been all along..

then we get into territory like stuff about the old DVD-A's and SACDs that were mixed and mastered with five full range speakers in mind and what a mess it all is if your 5.1 setup isn't correctly 'filling in the gaps' as it were, where sub kicks in where less than full range speakers give up the ghost! it's too late for a genuine 5.1 music standard (one format, one playback delivery system, one config etc) there's so many formats and configurations out there that are still in use, if you ditch them all for one you'd lose or upset swathes of your target audience consumers.. but its times like this I wish there were just one way to do it!

I've blathered on here (sorry! ) Bass management's a big topic (and the elephant in the room no-one wants to talk about where surround music's concerned imho) and it doesn't just apply to this Opeth BD-A.. too big for us all to go into in this thread.. I suggest this all gets moved to a dedicated thread? Jon/Tim/Bob/Ed/QL.. what do you reckon?

I feel like I'm missing something. When I select surround sound, my Yamaha receiver displays DTS but only the two stereo speakers play. The same thing is displayed If I switch to stereo. Are there more surround choices on the disc menu other than DTS? I tested my setup with other SW discs and they play fine. I'm going to try switching bluray players to see if that makes a difference. Other than that I'm stumped.

I didn't see a DTS stream on there, do you mean Dolby? There's Dolby 2-channel and Dolby 5.1 on the BD here.

The postman delivered the said Opeth Blu-ray this morning :banana:. So with all this talk about no Bass, I gave it a listen. My Denon is set-up to output PCM, my 4x Monitor Audio RS8s are approx. -3dB at 33Hz, Centre approx. -3dB at 45Hz. No sub-woofer, I don't like rattling floorboards, plus my speakers are large enough. I have the Pioneer SC-LX86amp set-up for no sub, with all frequencies below 80Hz sent to all 4x floorstanders. The lowest frequency 'attainable' in a room is set by 4x the longest diagonal, in my room not much below about 12Hz-15Hz could be reproduced anyway.

There is Bass, but the Bass Guitar playing underpins the keyboards, mainly 'following' the keyboards but a few octaves down, with the odd flourish from time to time, so it doesn't standout. So you hear the 'melody', but necessarily the instrument. It seems to me that the music on the album is very keyboard orientated, with guitar on top, Bass and strings underpinning. I like the album and the mix, its going on the rotation pile.

I just checked the bluray audio menu it displays DD true HD Multichannel. but the receiver displays DTS and only the front L and R speakers are displayed. I set the receiver to surround decode, now it displays pro logic/DTS, and did hear some background vocals and keyboards in the rears but I don't think this is the right setting. I always set the receiver to straight mode.

IMachine said:

I think you are right here. But why should I take signals to my sub when my rear and center speakers can play them?

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You shouldnt when your speakers can handle low frequencies, but I was confused about your set up as you wrote about having your speakers set to large and a few post later you mentioned this

The xover is set to 80hz for my sub for all speakers.

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Therefore I explained that the cross over setting does not have any effect when the speakers are set to large. I am probably misunderstanding you no big deal.

mixamatt said:

I just checked the bluray audio menu it displays DD true HD Multichannel. but the receiver displays DTS and only the front L and R speakers are displayed. I set the receiver to surround decode, now it displays pro logic/DTS, and did hear some background vocals and keyboards in the rears but I don't think this is the right setting. I always set the receiver to straight mode.

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The Denon doesn't give the most informative data on its display, but I only see DD True-HD multi & stereo when I switch between the audio settings, in multi plenty going on in the rear channels, mainly keyboards & vocals.. I let the Denon do the decode and output PCM to the amp.

STOP PRESS:

I just looked at all of the tracks in Nuendo, and relative to the other tracks, the Front Left and LFE tracks are out of phase. When you correct this there is tons of bass.

Just for those who don't know about phase, in simple terms audio waveforms can either be positive or negative, and you want all the channels in your mix to be the same, because if positive overlaps with negative, they cancel each other out just like a mathematical equation. This is especially apparent with bass, because it's usually a mono signal mixed in equal amounts to more than one channel - so lets say you have bass in FL and FR, and one of them is out of phase: positive bass and negative bass cancel each other out and you have zero bass. If you had either positive and positive you'd have bass, or negative and negative you'd have bass. In the case of this mix (I listened to it on headphones) you have bass in 5 channels: FL, FR, RL, RR and LFE. When you have your speakers set to small, the bass from all those channels is sent to your sub, and because the FL and LFE are out of phase, they cancel out the bass from the FR, RL and RR. What you're left with is some kick drum and some fuzzy indistinct bass guitar.

I know the internet is full of hyperbolic opinions, but I think this is a pretty major mastering/authoring error - I would encourage Roadrunner to recall the disc and fix this error, because it's not a simple thing for a layman to fix. Nor should the end user really have to jump through a load of hoops just to make the thing they paid good money for sound as it should, really.


I checked out the drums as well and they seem fine - I listened to the 5.1 mix with the FL, FR, C and LFE in one ear, and the RL and RR in the other ear, which gives me a good idea of the front/back panning. The drums are pretty standard SW style, with the bulk of the kit in the FL & FR, with the toms pulled out to the mid-sides and some of the cymbals further back toward the rear, with reverb from the kit in the rear speakers. When you fix the phase problems the drums sound a lot more normal and coherent, so that may be the problem. I also found the center channel to be used more sparingly than a lot of SW's recent mixes - it's used almost exclusively for lead vocals and lead guitar and is silent most of the rest of the time.

ETA: I wasn't able to rip the two live bonus tracks using either AudioMuxer or DVD Audio Extractor so I'm not sure if they suffer the same issue or not.

Thank you steelydave for figuring out the phase issues with this mix. I knew when I listened to this the first time that something was wrong with the phase between the individual channels and your work just proved that it's actually the case.

I agree, Roadrunner should recall this disc and replace it asap.

Thanks again!

I can only encourage people to write Roadrunner as I did earlier this week so that they will realize something is wrong with the disc. Right now I don't think Roadrunner takes it seriously since they never replied to me.

Oh gawd..! Since this disc sounds great to me, I guess I'll have to check to see if my speakers are all in phase! :yikes

Sub's easy, it has a phase switch on it, just one flick hey presto.. but fronts are Bi-amped so that'll be a pain in the posterior! (it's quite possible with 4 sets of cable something's screwed up in there.. though auto setup is supposed to identify that and last time I ran it, nothing was reported as being out of phase.. and everything's sounded alright in that time so I dunno!

Thanks for the info anyways Dave, great sleuthing as always!

Hi Dave, thanks a lot for the investigating. The mix spunds good in my set up. Not too much bass, but also not something I am missing.

You write, "when you set your speakers too small", does that mean this out of phase thing is not present when speakers are set to large? Thanks for your reply.

If your speakers are set to small you'll encounter it more, because the signals from each channel are being summed to mono inside the subwoofer, and cancelling each other out. It will be less pronounced if they're set to large, but it still won't sound as good as if everything was in phase because there will still be phase cancellation issues as the waveforms move through the air in the room and collide with each other.

Hi Steelydave,

thank for your work on this.
Can you tell us which speaker is out of phase? The LFE or the left front speaker to the other speakers?