The quandary: do I move on from my superb sounding 5.1 setup to be able to enjoy the latest surround technology? Thoughts/experiences welcome.

[DrKlahn]

One thing I don't see discussed here at all (tho I haven't read them ALL), is something Jim Fosgate did with his Dolby Pro Logic-II invention, and moreso, the improvements he did to it after DPL-II. Screw the quad records - he was happy with what he did with the Tate 101-A (and his later tweaks). Screw the fact that DPL-II decoded ac3 files with 39 dB of separation. He was happy with that. But What he did at his many home demos that he hosted over the years was to listen to STEREO records and listen to what DPl-II did to THOSE. He made dozens and dozens of mix CD's of stereo stuff that worked really well, using DPL-II. The more "ambient, the better". I swear if he wasn't inventing stuff (which he always was, up to his death-the last one came out 2 weeks after he passed), he was making mix CD's-- Of STEREO content, to be played at his demos. I have dozennnns of them. He could have cared less about how DPL-II decoded DPL-II files anymore, what he wanted to show the world was "USE IT ON YOUR STEREO RECORDINGS!"
And THAT is why I suggest keeping your 5.1 DPL-II alive. It's why I do. Expand your stereo stuff to 5.1 (to 7.1 if you're lucky enuff to have a FAP-1 in 7.1-I have 3). It does things that can be quite shocking. Like a clarinet in the rear right that from a Bruce Swedien record, seeems like it was mixed that way. An album I MADE for a blues-rock band decodes with 1 guitar in the rear left. I didn't mix it that way... but it's only in the rear left.
Look, Regardless of the quality of your system, enjoy what is does to stereo. I teach at a university in Digital Media (Audio, duh) and I encourage my students to use that system to make albeit "fake" surrounds, definitely a form of spatial audio that you don't get from your lazy-ass stereo mixes (yes I encourage them to mix in surround and atmos, but how many take me up on that? Yes, you are correct, 3%).
Yeah, I record in surround alot, and you can move alot of your surround (and stereo) stuff up to dolby atmos. But what modern formats, which can render your 7.1 files or 7.2.4 from a bluray or game, into your speaker set, without loss, but they DO NOT upconvert the files like DPL-II does. Like it or not, it does enhance stereo. That statement comes from the inventor, and from me as well as. One thing Jim taught me that stuck.
-MikeWiz

If you like what the upmixing does, then use it. I have had good and bad experiences with it. Movies trend more towards upmixing being beneficial for me, music the opposite. If I engaged any modes on the Marantz that forced upmixing several 5.1 recordings would get the vocals spread out in an unappealing fashion and the dimensionality of the mix would be degraded. Stereo might be a bit better, but the L/R in my setup do a very good job with 2ch so I tend to leave it be.

As far as the DPL debate, the current flavor of Dolby upmixing built into the Lyngdorf seems to work fine for the occasional old recording played through it. Though I couldn't say how faithful it would be to an old school DPL system.

 

[Owen Smith]

As far as the DPL debate, the current flavor of Dolby upmixing built into the Lyngdorf seems to work fine for the occasional old recording played through it. Though I couldn't say how faithful it would be to an old school DPL system.

I've run some DPL and DPL II test files through Dolby Surround Upmix and it's not very faithful. DSU spreads all the positions across a lot more speakers, generally all of them except the speaker diagonally opposite to the original intent. I posted more details on a QQ thread months ago. DTS Neural:X is a lot more positionally faithful, it's almost completely accurate to DPL II positionally but it annoyingly puts a ton of bass boost on that is too much in my room.

 

[MidiMagic]

Well, I digitized all of my tapes when I realized that repairing the decks was going to be a second and third career. A lot of VHS, a few R-R, and probably a couple dozen cassettes, so I was at least ahead of the game on that front. A few VHS wouldn’t play on any deck I could get my hands on (looks like the control track weakened), and I still have them in the hopes that I’ll get a deck that will work, but it’s another bucket list project.

I also have vinyl in four speeds and three sizes, going back to about 80 Edison Diamond Discs. I have a Shure cartridge with a 78 stylus. Only one 16-2/3 record - a 7” recording of Scheherezade. It sounds like crap, but my dear old Miracord plays it.

I also have a fair collection of laserdiscs. I’ve replaced all the movies, but a lot of the music productions are unique to the format. I hang on to the hardware for that, too.

My unique collection is EVR films. (Search “Motorola Teleplayer.”) I probably have 30 or 40 of those, and three decks to play them in - one to use (slightly modified so the audio isn’t stupid on playback) and two for parts you’ll have to machine yourself. I know why it never caught on, but it’s still a format younwon’t be able to play on “modern” gear. NTSC video out, but my AVR handles that.

I definitely hear you on the old computer programs, though. I had my own shop for a couple of uears, and busted my ass setting up an inventory and parts list database on PCFILE-R, which worked well on my dear old DOS machine if you transferred all the files to a RAM drive before you used it. Otherwise it would wear out your 32MB hard drive, opening and closing various files as it looked up stuff. Although I no longer care about parts lists, I do have a fair inventory of parts for hobby purposes, and I had to build a new database in Access for that. It’s nowhere near as tidy.

I also had a large recipe database (looking at the files directly, it seems unnecessarily complicated) that won’t come close to running on a modern PC, even in a command window.

Wordstar files can be opened with a file reader program and the text extracted, but it’s a pain. Fortunately, I did all of those years ago, so that’s not an issue, either.

I will say, though, that I don’t miss dot-matrix printers. Even though all my .mac images were unreadable decades ago.

 

[MidiMagic]

Well, I digitized all of my tapes when I realized that repairing the decks was going to be a second and third career. A lot of VHS, a few R-R, and probably a couple dozen cassettes, so I was at least ahead of the game on that front. A few VHS wouldn’t play on any deck I could get my hands on (looks like the control track weakened), and I still have them in the hopes that I’ll get a deck that will work, but it’s another bucket list project.

Note that VHS originally had 2-hour, 4-hour, and 6-hour tape formats.

The newest players can't play the 4-hour format. And VHS is NTSC.

I also have vinyl in four speeds and three sizes, going back to about 80 Edison Diamond Discs. I have a Shure cartridge with a 78 stylus. Only one 16-2/3 record - a 7” recording of Scheherezade. It sounds like crap, but my dear old Miracord plays it.

If you have Edison records, you have a fifth speed: 80 RPM. You also need to be able to play vertical recordings (It shows up in the surround channel in Dolby Surround).

If you like what the upmixing does, then use it. I have had good and bad experiences with it. Movies trend more towards upmixing being beneficial for me, music the opposite. If I engaged any modes on the Marantz that forced upmixing several 5.1 recordings would get the vocals spread out in an unappealing fashion and the dimensionality of the mix would be degraded. Stereo might be a bit better, but the L/R in my setup do a very good job with 2ch so I tend to leave it be.

As far as the DPL debate, the current flavor of Dolby upmixing built into the Lyngdorf seems to work fine for the occasional old recording played through it. Though I couldn't say how faithful it would be to an old school DPL system.

I've run some DPL and DPL II test files through Dolby Surround Upmix and it's not very faithful. DSU spreads all the positions across a lot more speakers, generally all of them except the speaker diagonally opposite to the original intent. I posted more details on a QQ thread months ago. DTS Neural:X is a lot more positionally faithful, it's almost completely accurate to DPL II positionally but it annoyingly puts a ton of bass boost on that is too much in my room.

DPL has logic. The new Dolby Surround is NO-Logic.

Also, I could not even look at the display of my first three computers. They require an NTSC color set on the old channel 3.

 

[barfle]

Note that VHS originally had 2-hour, 4-hour, and 6-hour tape formats.

The newest players can't play the 4-hour format. And VHS is NTSC.

If you have Edison records, you have a fifth speed: 80 RPM. You also need to be able to play vertical recordings (It shows up in the surround channel in Dolby Surround).

VHS originally had two-hour recording time only. Further development gave us narrower video heads and tighter helical scans.

VHS is analog video, and depending on where you lived at the time, it could have been PAL, SECAM, or even PAL-M. The four-hour mode had no improvement over the six-hour mode, as both used the same set of narrow video heads. PAL VHS actually had (iirc) an eight-hour speed, given the slower frame rate of the system. And then a slightly longer tape became available, but it was pretty fragile.

My laser discs and EVR films both output NTSC. My AVR accepts those inputs and converts them to HDMI for my TV. I don’t know if it does PAL or the other analog formats, but I suppose the manual could tell me.

The vertical modulation on Diamond Discs is handled easily by switching the phase of one side of the stereo cartridge.

 

[Owen Smith]

VHS is analog video, and depending on where you lived at the time, it could have been PAL, SECAM, or even PAL-M. The four-hour mode had no improvement over the six-hour mode, as both used the same set of narrow video heads. PAL VHS actually had (iirc) an eight-hour speed, given the slower frame rate of the system. And then a slightly longer tape became available, but it was pretty fragile.

Eventually we had an even thinner tape that could do 5 hours at normal speed or 10 hours long play with PAL. I never used those tapes, I only used 3 and 4 hour ones which do 6 and 8 hours long play PAL.

And in the UK our better quality VHS decks could also play NTSC tapes, output as PAL60 ie the player transcoded the NTSC composite video to PAL encoding but still output at 60i. I can play those. It requires our TVs to display PAL60 too but they have done for decades, long before they could display 24fps.

 

[MidiMagic]

VHS originally had two-hour recording time only. Further development gave us narrower video heads and tighter helical scans.

VHS is analog video, and depending on where you lived at the time, it could have been PAL, SECAM, or even PAL-M. The four-hour mode had no improvement over the six-hour mode, as both used the same set of narrow video heads. PAL VHS actually had (iirc) an eight-hour speed, given the slower frame rate of the system. And then a slightly longer tape became available, but it was pretty fragile.

My laser discs and EVR films both output NTSC. My AVR accepts those inputs and converts them to HDMI for my TV. I don’t know if it does PAL or the other analog formats, but I suppose the manual could tell me.

The vertical modulation on Diamond Discs is handled easily by switching the phase of one side of the stereo cartridge.

I do that. But I also have a simple circuit to do it after the preamp.

 

[barfle]

Eventually we had an even thinner tape that could do 5 hours at normal speed or 10 hours long play with PAL. I never used those tapes, I only used 3 and 4 hour ones which do 6 and 8 hours long play PAL.

And in the UK our better quality VHS decks could also play NTSC tapes, output as PAL60 ie the player transcoded the NTSC composite video to PAL encoding but still output at 60i. I can play those. It requires our TVs to display PAL60 too but they have done for decades, long before they could display 24fps.

One of the more arcane effects of NTSC is that the field rate is not 60 Hz, but roughly 59.95. It is off by one part in 1050, or one scan line every two fields. It has to do with making sure the various harmonics of the sync pulses don’t interfere with each other, and is one of the wonders of analog video.

What’s curious is that even on Blu-rays, which use a totally different set of rules, I see frame rates that are adjusted by that same factor, even 24fps movies.

 

[DanRuben]

I recently saw Steven Wilson claim that 35% of the content on Apple Music is now in Dolby Atmos. I did a double take at that. My biggest fear has been that Atmos will turn out just to be a fad and end up going the way of Quad 4.0 in the 70s.

But if Wilson is correct then Atmos really is the new stereo and everybody is going to have some kind of Atmos system in the future, although I fear that for most people it will mean whatever is built in to their laptop or TV by default.

So yeah, do switch