AC3 (Minnetonka) vs. WMV9

[Dave Friend]

Is your goal to make 5.1 for DVD? If so, ac3 is the correct choice.

Dave

[Uwe Lansing]

Thx Dave, but I only want to know the differences in quality… (some standalones can handle WMV9)

regards
Uwe

[Harm Millaard]

WMV9 AFAIK does not encode to 5.1 sound. Minnetonka is the only way that I know to create 5.1 sound.

Harm Millaard

[Uwe Lansing]

Ham, it does. If you go under Audio-Codec to the professionel settings

[Harm Millaard]

Thanks Uwe, I did not know that.

Harm Millaard

[Dave Friend]

With WM9 it is possible to create/use uncompressed files. AC3 is always compressed to some degree. So if your end-product will support uncompressed that would be better.

Given WM9 and AC3 files created from the same source material and compressed at the same bitrate I doubt most listeners would notice any difference between them. If someone is able to detect a difference I suspect that which was “better” would be entirely subjective.

OTOH, WM9 can handle bit-depths and sample rates beyond 16 bits/sample @ 48Khz. Can the Minnetonka encoder do that? I’m not sure.

Dolby is undoubtedly the more universal format with regards to set-top playback machines. The contrary is probably true if the expected playback platform is a PC.

Dave

[Dave Friend]

[Uwe] “some standalones can handle WMV9”

Can they handle a multi-channel WM9 and properly decode it to 5.1 surround sound?
(This is not a sarcastic question. I honestly don’t know.)

Dave

[Uwe Lansing]

Thank you Dave for your informative posting. Now I already see better through a little bit. I think, with a good DVD player, linked with a HDTV, WMA Pro 5.1 is complete enough. And hardly to distinguish from Minnetonka AC3/5.1…

regards
Uwe

[Uwe Lansing]

There are some devices of different manufacturers like this one:
https://www.kiss-technology.com/?p=600en

[Harm Millaard]

I have 4 different brands of standalones (Sony, Panasonic, JVC and Daewoo) and none can handle WMV, all can handle MPEG.

Harm Millaard