DVD/DTS Poll Deep Purple - Stormbringer [DTS/DD DVD+CD]

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Rate the Audio-DVD of Deep Purple - STORMBRINGER


  • Total voters
    41
Good grief…
I will admit, I got worried when I saw amazon switch "DTS 5.1" to stereo by all of the tracks on Disc 2, but amazon's information can be so screwy sometimes that I didn't say anything so as not to cause any worry over something that I thought was a screwup on amazon's part. Now it's for real, and those who purchased it unfortunately got the short end of the stick on this one, just like those who purchased the single CD edition of the "Octopus" remix that had "5.1 mix" on the seal.
I hope anyone who did purchase it can return it and get their money back without hassle as this really could be an example of false and/or misleading advertising and information.
As for me, I'm glad I didn't bite on this version at all. I still may get the European CD/DVD set one day, but the content of this album is mostly 'meh', though it does finish up with the gorgeous "Solider of Fortune". :)
 
It's a CD. I'll contact Bull Moose, but if anyone else is considering this, hopefully, they'll learn from my experience.

I contacted Bull Moose, and even though I opened the CD case, they let me return it for a refund, including my return shipping. I have to say I'm impressed with their customer service.

I also picked up the real CD/DVD of the album elsewhere. Not great, but not bad, either. I'll give it a few more listens before voting.
 
I contacted Bull Moose, and even though I opened the CD case, they let me return it for a refund, including my return shipping. I have to say I'm impressed with their customer service.

I also picked up the real CD/DVD of the album elsewhere. Not great, but not bad, either. I'll give it a few more listens before voting.

I'm glad you decided to contact Bullmoose...I thought they would help you:)
 
I contacted Bull Moose, and even though I opened the CD case, they let me return it for a refund, including my return shipping. I have to say I'm impressed with their customer service.

I also picked up the real CD/DVD of the album elsewhere. Not great, but not bad, either. I'll give it a few more listens before voting.

I'm glad you decided to contact Bullmoose...I thought they would help you:)
 
Listened to my copy last night. Good, not great, but I liked it. Voted a 9. Very extensive liner notes and Glenn Hughes did the mix from quad tape to 5.1. I think the reason I liked it musically is because it is so not the classic Deep Purple, that it is good. Blackmore is still playing and he can do no wrong. The 5.1 audio is full and alive. It could be a little more discrete and defined but definitely all speakers are working and not even close to ambient.
 
Listened to my copy last night. Good, not great, but I liked it. Voted a 9. Very extensive liner notes and Glenn Hughes did the mix from quad tape to 5.1. I think the reason I liked it musically is because it is so not the classic Deep Purple, that it is good. Blackmore is still playing and he can do no wrong. The 5.1 audio is full and alive. It could be a little more discrete and defined but definitely all speakers are working and not even close to ambient.

Markie did you give IT the 'double treatment?' Just treated mine and it sounds a helluva lot better.
 
So a couple of years ago I said this:

The overall fidelity of the DTS track is really good, but I really could've done without the derived center channel - they did something to the EQ on it that makes it stand out rather than blend in with the front imaging and I find it really distracting.

More recently I've been ripping my entire collection to FLAC including DTS DVD-Vs and it was always my intention to rip this and discard the center channel. So while I was doing that I had a look at the whole thing to check for phase errors, channel assignment problems etc.

What I found (in a nutshell, more detail below) is the following:

1. The center channel was created by duplicating the front left channel (only), applying an 80ms delay and then adding an EQ boost of a few dB to it from about 100Hz up to 2500Hz. The result is that the center channel sounds a bit like a loudspeaker at a shopping mall or something, and the delay between it and the FL channel causes all kinds of weird phase issues - the phase meter i was using was fluttering back and forth like it was having a seizure or something. Normally fake center channels are created by summing the front left and right channels and then reducing the volume of the resultant derived channel, so the way they've done it here is odd to say the least. Also, with the EQ boost on the center channel it effectively makes it the loudest/most dominant channel in front of you and collapses the stereo image in to the middle - this album sounds so much better with it gone.

2. The LFE channel is out of phase (!) and way way too loud. My supposition is that because the LFE was out of phase, the more they turned it up, the more it was cancelling out the bass in the 4 main channels. So as a result they just kept cranking it up until it reached some kind of point of equilibrium, because when I corrected the phase of the LFE I had to turn it down by 20 (TWENTY) dB. There's actually nothing unique in the LFE channel (ie they didn't shave any bass off the main channels) so if you want to delete the LFE track entirely you can. I chose to keep it because even with large speakers, I think it's nice to have a little something coming out of the subwoofer if you have your speakers set to large. The 20dB reduction was just done by ear and looking at waveforms (and based on the LFE levels in other .1 tracks I've seen) so it may not be perfect, but it's in the ballpark.

3. The track index points are wrong for every single track (and by different amounts for each track) so the net result is that the first 2 or 3 notes of each song is cut off, instead appearing at the tail end of the track before. I imported all the songs in to my workstation as one long track and re-exported them so the tracks were split correctly. If you want to do this too, the track timings are as such:

Track 1: 00:00.000
Track 2: 04:06.350
Track 3: 08:32.000
Track 4: 13:03.000
Track 5: 18:10.600
Track 6: 21:30.000
Track 7: 24:56.350
Track 8: 29:23.000
Track 9: 33:37.000

Everything else checks out though, the channel assignments are correct, everything (else) is in phase, and it doesn't look like they compressed it much if at all - the DR readings are between DR11 and DR13 which puts it close to even the unremastered 80's CD issue. I'm not overly in love with the EQ - it's a little midrangey and the treble falls off steeply around 15kHz but it's probably as good as it gets for standard DTS. I'm still experimenting with EQ for this album but i think if you take a little bit out between 1kHz and 3kHz it might help a bit.

Here are a couple of screenshots that illustrate the problems I was explaining earlier:

Fig 1. showing that the center channel waveform is identical to the front left

(the red line shows where the identical time-offset peaks start)

stormbringer_fl_vs_c_waveform.jpg


Fig 2. showing the weird midrange boost on the center channel

(The green waveform is the front left channel, and the pink bits that stick up between 100Hz and 2500Hz are the center channel, showing where it's boosted relative to the front left.)

stormbringer_fl_vs_c.jpg


Fig 3. showing how LOUD the LFE track is relative to the other channels

stormbringer_all_channels.jpg


I didn't do a screenshot of my phase meter showing that the LFE was out of phase, but you can take my word for it that it was. The phase meter goes from -1 (out of phase) to 0 (no phase correlation at all) to +1 (in phase) and the LFE track was consistently at -1 with no movement at all.

One last note, I don't think Glenn Hughes did the quad to 5.1 mix, he supervised the remixing of the bonus tracks on the stereo CD. I believe Peter Mew did the quad to 5.1 transfer which would probably explain a lot of the problems.
 
After spinning this title two times in a row, I'm giving this one a '6', breaking down my vote this way:

Music: 2/3
Surround Mix: 2/3
Fidelity: 2/3
High-Res Disc: 0/1

It's very disappointing in all regards after I have been listening to a lot of the Chicago Quadio set lately, which is perfect in every regard.
There's only about 3 songs on here that I really love, with those being "Holy Man", "The Gypsy" and the very beautiful "Solider of Fortune". The rest range from OK to not very good at all.
On the surround and fidelity front, this release is not as discrete as it could be, and I think that comes down to three possible factors:
1) The original Quad mix wasn't that discrete to begin with.
2) The tinkering to make this a 5.1 mix might have made it lose some of its discrete value
3) The lossy DTS encoding may have blurred the imaging up a little bit. (I've heard that happen before when comparing the DTS track against a lossless source.)

So my advice is get it if you like Deep Purple. On the other hand, if you're just a casual fan, stick with "Machine Head" (Quad or 5.1) as it really is better in all regards.
 
So a couple of years ago I said this:



More recently I've been ripping my entire collection to FLAC including DTS DVD-Vs and it was always my intention to rip this and discard the center channel. So while I was doing that I had a look at the whole thing to check for phase errors, channel assignment problems etc.

What I found (in a nutshell, more detail below) is the following:

1. The center channel was created by duplicating the front left channel (only), applying an 80ms delay and then adding an EQ boost of a few dB to it from about 100Hz up to 2500Hz. The result is that the center channel sounds a bit like a loudspeaker at a shopping mall or something, and the delay between it and the FL channel causes all kinds of weird phase issues - the phase meter i was using was fluttering back and forth like it was having a seizure or something. Normally fake center channels are created by summing the front left and right channels and then reducing the volume of the resultant derived channel, so the way they've done it here is odd to say the least. Also, with the EQ boost on the center channel it effectively makes it the loudest/most dominant channel in front of you and collapses the stereo image in to the middle - this album sounds so much better with it gone.

2. The LFE channel is out of phase (!) and way way too loud. My supposition is that because the LFE was out of phase, the more they turned it up, the more it was cancelling out the bass in the 4 main channels. So as a result they just kept cranking it up until it reached some kind of point of equilibrium, because when I corrected the phase of the LFE I had to turn it down by 20 (TWENTY) dB. There's actually nothing unique in the LFE channel (ie they didn't shave any bass off the main channels) so if you want to delete the LFE track entirely you can. I chose to keep it because even with large speakers, I think it's nice to have a little something coming out of the subwoofer if you have your speakers set to large. The 20dB reduction was just done by ear and looking at waveforms (and based on the LFE levels in other .1 tracks I've seen) so it may not be perfect, but it's in the ballpark.

3. The track index points are wrong for every single track (and by different amounts for each track) so the net result is that the first 2 or 3 notes of each song is cut off, instead appearing at the tail end of the track before. I imported all the songs in to my workstation as one long track and re-exported them so the tracks were split correctly. If you want to do this too, the track timings are as such:

Track 1: 00:00.000
Track 2: 04:06.350
Track 3: 08:32.000
Track 4: 13:03.000
Track 5: 18:10.600
Track 6: 21:30.000
Track 7: 24:56.350
Track 8: 29:23.000
Track 9: 33:37.000

Everything else checks out though, the channel assignments are correct, everything (else) is in phase, and it doesn't look like they compressed it much if at all - the DR readings are between DR11 and DR13 which puts it close to even the unremastered 80's CD issue. I'm not overly in love with the EQ - it's a little midrangey and the treble falls off steeply around 15kHz but it's probably as good as it gets for standard DTS. I'm still experimenting with EQ for this album but i think if you take a little bit out between 1kHz and 3kHz it might help a bit.

Here are a couple of screenshots that illustrate the problems I was explaining earlier:

Fig 1. showing that the center channel waveform is identical to the front left

(the red line shows where the identical time-offset peaks start)

View attachment 25818


Fig 2. showing the weird midrange boost on the center channel

(The green waveform is the front left channel, and the pink bits that stick up between 100Hz and 2500Hz are the center channel, showing where it's boosted relative to the front left.)

View attachment 25817


Fig 3. showing how LOUD the LFE track is relative to the other channels

View attachment 25819


I didn't do a screenshot of my phase meter showing that the LFE was out of phase, but you can take my word for it that it was. The phase meter goes from -1 (out of phase) to 0 (no phase correlation at all) to +1 (in phase) and the LFE track was consistently at -1 with no movement at all.

One last note, I don't think Glenn Hughes did the quad to 5.1 mix, he supervised the remixing of the bonus tracks on the stereo CD. I believe Peter Mew did the quad to 5.1 transfer which would probably explain a lot of the problems.


Did you remake this by dumping the center channel completely and reversing the phase of the sub channel? Other than recalibrating the levels, that would be it, correct?
 
Did you remake this by dumping the center channel completely and reversing the phase of the sub channel? Other than recalibrating the levels, that would be it, correct?

Yeah, dump the center channel completely, and with the LFE either invert the phase and reduce level by 20dB, or dump it as well. It's still a slightly crusty sounding recording compared to a lot of the more recent hirez quad releases and I don't know if it's the DTS encoding, or if the quad mix itself was sourced from a commercial quad reel (rather than the master) that's responsible for that butwhen you get rid of that awful center channel and sort out the sub it makes a lot of difference. I'm pretty sensitive to sound quality issues, but after those fixes I'd say the quality is good enough to be an enjoyable listen. That might sound a bit like damning it with faint praise but I'm glad that this mix made it out there, even if it's a little less than perfect.

There might not be quite the extreme degree of discrete seperation in the rear speakers compared to, say, the Columbia quad mixes, but there are plenty of things that are only in the rear speakers including backing vocals on several tracks, the keyboards in 'Hold On' and a lot of the guitar overdubs just to name a few.
 
Yeah, dump the center channel completely, and with the LFE either invert the phase and reduce level by 20dB, or dump it as well. It's still a slightly crusty sounding recording compared to a lot of the more recent hirez quad releases and I don't know if it's the DTS encoding, or if the quad mix itself was sourced from a commercial quad reel (rather than the master) that's responsible for that butwhen you get rid of that awful center channel and sort out the sub it makes a lot of difference. I'm pretty sensitive to sound quality issues, but after those fixes I'd say the quality is good enough to be an enjoyable listen. That might sound a bit like damning it with faint praise but I'm glad that this mix made it out there, even if it's a little less than perfect.

There might not be quite the extreme degree of discrete seperation in the rear speakers compared to, say, the Columbia quad mixes, but there are plenty of things that are only in the rear speakers including backing vocals on several tracks, the keyboards in 'Hold On' and a lot of the guitar overdubs just to name a few.

Cool thanks. I will give it a try and compare it to a conversion I have.
 
Thanks, steelydave... took your suggestions and I much prefer the new sound(y)

Well its small beer (smaller than a micro brewery beer!) but its on my CD-4 shopping list now (no EQ or faux centre/LFE if I ever get around to doing it.. ;) ..gotta figure out CD-4 first of course.. feels like a long way off that.. baby steps! :D ) love this album and the Quad, EMI/Mew/ & co had the master tapes in their hands, they could have made this perfect..
 
Yeah, dump the center channel completely, and with the LFE either invert the phase and reduce level by 20dB, or dump it as well. It's still a slightly crusty sounding recording compared to a lot of the more recent hirez quad releases and I don't know if it's the DTS encoding, or if the quad mix itself was sourced from a commercial quad reel (rather than the master) that's responsible for that butwhen you get rid of that awful center channel and sort out the sub it makes a lot of difference. I'm pretty sensitive to sound quality issues, but after those fixes I'd say the quality is good enough to be an enjoyable listen. That might sound a bit like damning it with faint praise but I'm glad that this mix made it out there, even if it's a little less than perfect.

There might not be quite the extreme degree of discrete seperation in the rear speakers compared to, say, the Columbia quad mixes, but there are plenty of things that are only in the rear speakers including backing vocals on several tracks, the keyboards in 'Hold On' and a lot of the guitar overdubs just to name a few.

Thanks, makes it much better! The conversion I have holds up surprisingly well. I will keep both...
 
Well I followed the instructions of QQ Member: steelydave and ditched the Centre & LFE.. and I love it even more..! In its original 4.0/Quad form I'd give this a 10. Superb.. wonder why they futzed with it for the DVD when it was perfect as it was already!? :rolleyes: Anyway, thank you Dave, you're a trooper :upthumb
 
Well I followed the instructions of QQ Member: steelydave and ditched the Centre & LFE.. and I love it even more..! In its original 4.0/Quad form I'd give this a 10. Superb.. wonder why they futzed with it for the DVD when it was perfect as it was already!? :rolleyes: Anyway, thank you Dave, you're a trooper :upthumb

What took you so long! ;) This procedure, really does make a huge difference. I have a conversion of the original quad and the fix to this dvd makes the conversion sound poor in comparison. The dvd in its original form was horrible, now it is great really, all things considered.

Do you have an origional quad to compare to this fixed dvd, I would love to get your feedback on a comparison, especially if it is a direct vinyl CD-4 or matrix encode run through the Surround Master...

PS thanks again steelydave!
 
What took you so long! ;) This procedure, really does make a huge difference. I have a conversion of the original quad and the fix to this dvd makes the conversion sound poor in comparison. The dvd in its original form was horrible, now it is great really, all things considered.

Do you have an origional quad to compare to this fixed dvd, I would love to get your feedback on a comparison, especially if it is a direct vinyl CD-4 or matrix encode run through the Surround Master...

PS thanks again steelydave!

Hehe.. I wised up in the end :eek: I don't have any other version to compare it to.. but I'm working on it :)
 
Well, here I am right after FredBlue on this thread. That makes me feel good. Listening now to this super disc while I am in DTS mode at 48khz, 5.1.
Sometimes I have to stop buying and listen to all the titles I do have, nah.
 
Hi there,

I am having trouble ripping the DTS tracks 1 and 9 from the DVD-V. It appears that there's something wrong with the encoding information. I tried ripping the DTS tracks with Audiomuxer and DVD Decrypter (IFO Mode). The DVD is brand new, "Made in the EU", file date is "30.01.2009".

Error on track 1 and 9 is:
DTS-96/24, 5.1 channels, 0:04:06, 1510kbps, 96kHz
Decoding with libDcaDec DTS Decoder...
Writing WAV...
Creating file "C:\Stormbringer\VIDEO_TS\VTS_01_PGC_02_CHAPTER_01_1 - 0x89 - Audio - DTS - 6ch - 48kHz - DRC - English - DELAY 0ms.wav"...
libDcaDec output changed from 6 channels, 96kHz to 6 channels, 48kHz. <ERROR>
Aborted at file position 524288. <ERROR>

Any ideas?

Cheers,
Andreas
 
I played this again recently and realized I'd never voted on it. My newer used Oppo I find takes this disc and gives it a slightly sharper focus. Center channel is always off unless I have a modern 5.1 mix playing so no problems there. I don't use a sub in general as my hard wood floors seem to give some bass bounce as is.

Some tracks on this album seem mixed less discreetly like the first two, and later tracks seem to contain more separation. Strange.

Anyway, the album not being their best, yet not a bust either gets it an 8.

Sound and mix is not too bad, but not one of the best either gets an 8.

It's a solid 8 and could have been a 9 had high-Rez mastering taken it to a higher fidelity place. But not to be. I'm still thrilled to have another Deep Purple album in its original quad mix. Thankful a U.K. DVD Product was NTSC. It's a likable 8.
 
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