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106 Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About DVD<br />
adjust the volume, such as turning it down, for example, during a loud<br />
commercial. (Of course, the commercial makers can cheat and set an<br />
artificially low DN level, causing your receiver to turn up the volume during<br />
the commercial.) Turning DN on or off on your receiver has no effect on the<br />
dynamic range or sound quality; its effect is no different than turning the<br />
volume control up or down.<br />
All five DVD-Video audio formats support karaoke mode, which has two<br />
channels for stereo (left and right) plus an optional guide melody channel (M)<br />
and two optional vocal channels (V1 and V2).<br />
A DVD-5 with only one surround stereo audio stream (at 192 kbps) can<br />
hold over 55 hours of audio. A DVD-18 can hold over 200 hours.<br />
For more information about multichannel surround sound, see Bobby<br />
Owsinski’s FAQ at www.surroundassociates.com/fqmain.html.<br />
Can You Explain This Dolby Digital, Dolby Surround, Dolby Pro<br />
Logic, and DTS Stuff in Plain English?<br />
Almost every DVD contains audio in the Dolby Digital (AC-3) format. DTS is<br />
an optional audio format that can be added to a disc in addition to Dolby<br />
Digital audio. Both DTS and Dolby Digital can store mono, stereo, and multichannel<br />
audio (usually 5.1 channels).<br />
Every DVD player in the world has an internal Dolby Digital decoder. The<br />
built-in two-channel decoder turns Dolby Digital into stereo audio, which<br />
can be fed to almost any type of audio equipment (receiver, TV, boombox,<br />
and so on) as a standard analog stereo signal using a pair of stereo audio<br />
cables or as a digital PCM audio signal using a coax or optical cable. Refer<br />
to “How Do I Hook up a DVD Player?” for more information.<br />
A standard audio mixing technique called Dolby Surround “piggybacks”<br />
a rear channel and a center channel onto a two-channel signal. A Dolby<br />
Surround signal can be played on any stereo system (or even a mono system),<br />
in which case the rear- and center-channel sounds remain mixed in<br />
with the left and right channels. When a Dolby Surround signal is played on<br />
a multichannel audio system that knows how to handle it, the extra channels<br />
are extracted to feed center speakers and rear speakers. The original<br />
technique of decoding Dolby Surround, called simply Dolby Surround,<br />
extracts only the rear channel. The improved decoding technique, Dolby<br />
Pro Logic, also extracts the center channel. A brand-new decoding technology,<br />
Dolby Pro Logic II, extracts both the center channel and the rear<br />
channel and also processes the signals to create more of a 3-D audio<br />
environment.<br />
Dolby Surround is independent of the storage or transmission format. In<br />
other words, a two-channel Dolby Surround signal can be analog audio,
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