grolschie: Upgrading speakers, can make it sound worse. :-(

grolschie: So do TVNZ need convincing somehow that this is a problem? 

richms: ... its probably being decided by deaf old guys on a board or something who own a bose and cant hear the shortcomings with that or anything.

richms:

Best thing with AC3 is the LFE - means that those of us with decent systems can actually get some bass out of it ;)

tehconz: In terms of DD 5.1, programs have been ingested off tape with 5.1 audio for several months now, and you can actually listen in 5.1 within the building. The only step left is to reconfigure the headend encoder (and have Sky reconfigure theirs) to encode a dolby stream. As was mentioned earlier, the audio processors have a pseudo 5.1 function, which activates in the absence of real 5.1 audio, but this only feeds the dolby steam, the AAC stream will not change. Any "pseudo 5.1" you're hearing at the moment is Dolby Surround matrix encoding from the source material, nothing to do with the new kit. 

I'm not sure exactly what the holdup on 5.1 is either, but I'm told that it is quite a major task to reconfigure the headend, and is not an easily reversible process should something go wrong. It seems the go-ahead is tied up in management somewhere, just like the 16:9 switch was in 2007. The good news is that the new "Media Centre" playout facility is working pretty well, and more and more HD shows are being delivered. 


As for he HE-AAC audio quality, the bitrate was kept pretty low to allow more bandwidth for HD picture. Obviously the introduction of two DD5.1 streams will take even more bandwidth, and this may be part of the reluctance to fire it up. 

old3eyes:

The had no problems at all in configuring this for DD5.1 during the  China Olympics in  2008..

dontpanic42: At the very least, couldn't the bitrate be upped to a healthy 256kbps or more? Considering the video stream of most FreeviewHD stuff is between 4Mbps - 12Mbps, surely it wouldn't be to much of a toll on bandwidth if the audio bitrate increased to something more respectable than what can only be (guessing by the sound quality) around 80kbps, if that.
At least until DD comes.

ilovemusic:
Oh, and if TVNZ do go Dolby Digital in the far flung future, FFS set the channel flag correctly so that 2 ch material can be decoded properly without the forced 5.1 flag that TV3 uses.

lchiu7:

old3eyes:

The had no problems at all in configuring this for DD5.1 during the  China Olympics in  2008..

I thought of that also but then did TVNZ6/7 exist? Those channels would take up capacity on the transponder.

Still the question to ask is, how on each can broadcast engineers design a system where the delivery of HD content with appropriate audio has the potential to cause capacity constraints on the transmission?

I have  no idea if all Freeview decoders can handle DD but maybe the answer is to ditch the AAC track completely and save the bandwidth for something decent.