The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: horrible distortion on DVD

I’m just curious whether it’s just me, my ears or my speakers, but when I inserted my Hobbit 1 Extended DVDs into my p, something odd happened. I have no idea which person did the sound mixing here, but the sound sounds absolutely horrible. The best way I can describe it is by saying it sounds as though someone is holding their hands around the speakers, making it sound all hollow and muted and clogged. The strange thing is, though, that only the music seems to have this problem, not the sfx or dialogue.

is anyone else experiencing this as well? Does the Blu Ray or NTSC DVD have this problem, and more importantly, is the same happening on the Smaug DVD?

It’s a problem on the Blu-Ray too. It’s less severe on Smaug though.

Why didn’t they notice it? Is their a reasoning behind this? Do the LoTR films have this? I don’t know if I heard it in the cinema, but there the Misty Mountains music sounded truly magical, this is just… awful.

I imagine whoever is doing the sound mixing on the Blu-Rays is not taking into account as to how it will sound when downmixed into stereo.

No, you’re misunderstanding me, I have 5.1 speakers and it sounds horirble there too.

Yea. Here’s the deal. They don’t have to care. They just slop out whatever, knowing it will sell. Simple as that. There is absolutely no incentive to care anymore.

Huh? I thought LOTR franchises had a reputation of having an excellent representation…

Warner Bros Home Video, as anyone should know, is an exceedingly shitty company. They put out half-assed products and then years later release second versions that are almost better than the first, just so that people will double dip for those couple of extra bonus features. They don’t care if the sound of one of their biggest 2012 blockbusters is poorly-done. They can always just "fix" it for the 500-dollar box set.

Really, the only division of Warner Brothers I have any remote sense of respect for is Warner Archive, because they almost always release quality products of older material.

I don’t own An Unexpected Journey, but I rented the Blu-ray a few months back, had it downmixed to stereo, and it sounded fine to me. Or, in other words, I didn’t notice any sort of distortion in the music.

I solved the problem by refusing to watch such a massive mutilation of a charming, relatively simple little fable. But, sure.

I don’t hear the distortion on the blu-rays.

I use Arcsoft decoder to decode the DTS-HD 7.1 to 5.1 for surround sound system.
No clipping or distortion.

I would say it may be because it’s 7.1 being not compatible with your system, but DVD can only support 5.1 maximum.

I would say it’s your system.

It’s all peaches and cream of corn on my end.
the 3D blu-rays too.

Well, thanks for all your feedback! Now I have another reason to hate WB, so thanks for that too. Maybe my ears are too sensitive? I just downloaded a stereo version of the movie with audio description for blind people added, and even there the problem persists: dialogue is fine, music sounds terrible. I can’t believe no one on the Internet has complained about it yet. My earphones give the same result, so it can’t be my speakers only.

UPDATE: Just tweaked some speaker settings, it now sounds very good on my 5.1set, stereo remains impossible though, very odd.

Is this being played back from stand-alone DVD player or software on your computer?

Your player settings might have some effect, too.

Say, some Sony devices (PS3, etc) will allow some form of amplitude in volume.

Also, your surround sound system settings may have effected the results as well. Using very high equilizer settings along with different DSP effects will effect the distortion.

Ooh, uh, not sure what to tell you actually… I play all my DVDs on my Windows 7 computer using either VLC or Media Player Classics (the latter works brilliantly with all the Dolby Pro LogicII codecs). Every single file has sounded great so far, but it’s just the Hobbit in stereo that sounds horrible, even in VLC which hasn’t got DPII decoders. When I play the DVD using my Soudblaster X-Fi soundcard in 5.1 on my external speakers, the music sounds good. When I switch to stereo, it sounds horrible. Exactly the same happens when I use earphones with my built-in Realtek soundcard. I can’t imagine the problem is on my end because this has never happened in all the years that I have my hard- and software. Also, as I said earlier, I downloaded a stereo MP3 file of the film and there the music sounded horrible as well, so to me it seems like WB is messing up again. They’re really getting worse.

MPC has internal LAV filters, by default.
What are the settings for that?

I don’t trust interntal filtesr by MPC so I turn them off.

If downmixing to stereo is the only thing, I don’t think it’s WB so much.
When downmixing, there’s bound to be clipping and it’s up to the software to handle it. Rather, it’s up to you to tell the software how to handle it.

I wouldn’t trust an MP3 encode from some Joe. They’ll do anything they want and walk away.

Here’s what I got set for MPC-HC with LAV audio and FFDShow.
LAV audio decodes -> runs into FFDShow -> then sound card

I like to upsample to bloated 32bit range. it’s mostly to help reduce on distortion/clipping. but if you hear clipping, remove "float" so it’s integer. Some sound cards wont’ like float at all and will produce better results at either 32 integer or original bit depths (24bit, usually blu-ray; 16bit average for lossy AC3 audio — lossy formats don’t have a consistent bit depth).

"Clipping Protection" is vital to…. protect against clipping (if any).
But you will hear the difference if you have this enabled. But you will hear the clipping if you don’t have this enabled.
If you must downmix to stereo, recommended to enable this.

Another note: I set here for 5.1 so all 6.1/7.1 will get remixed to 5.1.
Then in FFDshow, I set it to "as-is" and it comes out fine on my 5.1 surround system.
For desktop speakers, I set FFDshow to downmix to stereo.
Works smoother this way.

I like to let FFDshow process all decoded audio, in case I want to use other filters (which I never really do, but equilizer sometimes).

"Normalize" may or may not help.
"Regain Volume" won’t hurt so much. It’s very noticable when "Normalize" is set higher than 100%.

Disable "LFE" if you don’t have anything that plays that range. Keeping LFE enabled can cause distortion, especially when downmixing to stereo.

FFDShow is set up the same as LAV audio for bit depths.

Lastly, make sure most DSP effects for your sound card are disabled. If you want to use them, enable only one to see how it effects audio playback. If too many are set, you will get destroyed audio.

For my Windows 7 (Realtek High Definition Audio sound card), I only have "Loundess Equilization" enabled as it doesn’t seem to cause any distortion or clipping of any kind.

Lastly lastly, make sure you sound card is set to match audio: logical bit depth and sample rate settings.
My sound card supports up to 24 bit depth with 48KHz sample rate so I leave it as that for movie watching.
It supports up to 192KHz sample rate but I have no speaker system that supports the frequency so it’s overkill.
any music I play >48KHz gets downsampled to 48KHz/44.1KHz via Foodbar before going throuh the sound system.

I agree, it was horribly bogged down by Peter Jackson wanking to his own selfish machinations and distorting a 300-page book into 2 of 3 shitty films.

First, I agree on the Jackson part. I liked H1 but H2 totally sucked, and God knows what Shore was thinking when he wrote the score for that one, but anyway…

I have the same settings as you do. I use FFD as well and have disabled the LFE. Can you describe ‘clipping’ and ‘floating’ though? If clipping means that the sound crackles, this is most certainly not happening. What I mean is that only the music, not the sfx or dialogue, sound horribly distorted. I can’t describe it differently.

Clipping is the distortion.
It can happen when you downmix the channels to different configuration.
7.1 to 5.1/2.0 or 5.1 to 2.0, etc.
Usually this is because the audio is mastered at very high levels so when the channels are mixed together, the combined loudness will be too much for a single channel (back left + front left + half center into one channel: front left) and cause this distortion.

Dialogue won’t be clipped most of the time. SFX will sometimes be noticably clipped.
Music will always be noticable since it runs for longer periods of times and can vary widely in volume.

Clipping mostly affects bass and produces ugly bass distortion.
I’m not making any spectrums to show what a clipped audio waveform looks like, you can google on it.

"float" is the type of bit depth, but only for bit depths 32 and above.
It’s math. Floating type vs. integer (32.88089 the values after the decimal point make it a floating type VS. 32.0000 the constant zero values after the decimal point make it a solid integer).

16 bit (normal bit depth for CD audio; sometimes BD audio; lossless digital music sales) is always integer.
24 bit (normal bit depth for DVD/HD-DVD/BD audio formats; rarely lossless digital music sales) is always integer.
32 bit (common bit depth for audio processing/recording for home users) can be either integer or float point.

If we select float point, we will never see the actual value. We don’t need to. Ever.
It’s just to mathematically help with any audio processing (Equilizer, channel mixing, etc).
Using 24bit and higher will help reduce this clipping distortion.
Using 32, you can choose float point (for more accuracy) but your soundcard might not like using floating point and cause extra noise or even more distortion.
Using 32 integer will most likely be safer than floating point if you don’t know whether or not your soundcard won’t throw a fit over floating values.
Really, once you use 24 bit, everything is just overkill beyond that value.

This is rather odd, then. Your settings shouldn’t have any problem.
But, why your DVD has such terrible corruption on downmixing to stereo is rather odd.

Is this a retail bought disc or some encode? Is it Region 1?

I’m going to encode the blu-ray audio down to DVD-compliant AC3 (448kbps/6ch = 74.66666666666667kbps per channel) and then give that a go to see if it clips when downmixed to stereo.
I’m also going to do a stereo encode that is DVD-compliant AC3 (448kbps/2ch = 224kbps per channel).

However, the fact that it plays fine when left in original 5.1 audio and corrupts when downmixing to stereo is enough to prove that something’s not downmixing properly.
It could be just the DVD’s have not been normalized to take downmixing into consideration.
The last DVD I bought was… Dexter season 8. On account the rest of my Dexter seasons were also in DVD.

———- Post added at 05:32 AM ———- Previous post was at 05:30 AM ———-

oh wait… you’re from Belgium. Is that where you’re really from?

Region 2? 25 frames per second?

I have the retail region 2 extended DVD set. I know there’s PAL speed-up, but that still wouldn’t explain the terrible distorttion when I downmix to stereo because all my other DVDs are PAL and they all sound very good in stereo, except this one. Your encoding results would be very interesting. I’m considering running the DVD through AutoGK and then I can see how the final stereo turns out there.

Your bit about over-mastering was also interesting. Could it be that they’re just so obsessed with getting the best results in 5.1 that this is the consequence? I think it’s crazy to spread the film over two disks to begin with because it totally kills the continuity; they seem to have an obsession with quality. If they’d just remove the useless Italian, French and German audiotracks…

my encodes use NTSC values (Region 1 here) so they wouldn’t work for you.

I would recommend using software designed for audio processing.
eac3to, it’s mentioned here a lot.
It gives accurate results and it’s updated.

AutoGK is no longer developed so all its software would be too ancient for any feasible results.

I’m using eac3to to do some AC3 encodes.
But it will all be timed to NTSC code as my sources are NTSC.
To convert to PAL time codes would require extra work to get it with the least pitch variation.

eac3to is free to use and since you’re going from AC3 to AC3, it will use internal LAV audio decoder which is free too.
For DTS-HD formats (from blu-ray, DVD-HD, etc), you’ll need to hack a third-party trial program to get the required libraries.
But the DTS-HD formats are not necessary for this.

With eac3to, when downmixing, if clipping is detected, a second pass will be performed to normalize audio to prevent clipping (entire audio is reduced to a new maximum. it won’t reduce just the peaks that are going over the boundaries; but the entire thing so quiet parts will become essentially quieter).

Okay, thanks. I’ve been using AutoGK for ages to back-up my DVDs on my pc for when we go on holiday an I’ve never had issues with it, but I’ll look into the software you proposed. If television sets with stereo speakers give the same result as the one I currently have, people are going to be sooo happy with their DVD and Blu-Ray…

Issues aren’t the thing when it comes to outdated software.
Improvements are what makes people update.
AutoGK will work for years to come as there aren’t too many bugs with it.
It’s just that the codecs are really old.

Use something like MeGUI. It uses eac3to for bit-exact audio converting.
It’s also updated on a consistent basis and gets lot of feedback from users to help improve it.
Using x264 to encode your movies is far better and more quality/space effective over using DivX or XviD.

well, the blu-ray doesn’t do this. I’ve watched it a couple times from PC with no distortion.
With blu-ray it’s easier to control sound quality as you’re working with the highest quality available (in this case DTS-HD Master Audio, 24 bit depth).
Source 7.1 -> LAV Audio 5.1 (for DTS decoding) -> FFDShow (for stereomixing).
This way, I don’t let the TV downmix for me. I don’t trust it.

I think it just may be DVD.

But encoding from BD audio to AC3:

7.1 DTS-HD MA to 5.1 AC3 = no clipping reported by eac3to.
So far, playing back in 5.1 should produce no distortion.
Now to test it with letting FFDShow downmix to stereo and see if produces anything.

7.1 DTS-HD MA to 2.0 AC3 = clipping detected, almost immediately (so clipping at least in the beginning of the film).
A second pass will be required to reduce clipping.
The audio needs to be reduced by a whopping 8.06dB to avoid clipping!
eac3to log:

D:\Temp>A:\Audio\eac3to\eac3to "K:\BD Remux [Non-Disc]\The Hobbit 2; The Desolation of Smaug (2013).mkv" 2: Hobbit2_stereo.ac3 -448 -downStereo
MKV, 1 video track, 1 audio track, 4 subtitle tracks, 2:41:18, 24p /1.001
1: h264/AVC, English, 1080p24 /1.001 (16:9)
2: DTS Master Audio, English, 7.1 channels, 24 bits, 48kHz
(core: DTS, 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 1509kbps, 48kHz)
3: Subtitle (PGS), English
4: Subtitle (PGS), French
5: Subtitle (PGS), Spanish
6: Subtitle (PGS), Portuguese
a02 Extracting audio track number 2…
a02 Decoding with ArcSoft DTS Decoder…
a02 Downmixing multi channel audio to stereo…
a02 Encoding AC3 <448kbps> with libAften…
a02 Creating file "Hobbit2_stereo.ac3"…
a02 Clipping detected, a 2nd pass will be necessary.
a02 The original audio track has a constant bit depth of 24 bits.
a02 The processed audio track has a constant bit depth of 64 bits.
a02 Starting 2nd pass…
a02 Extracting audio track number 2…
a02 Decoding with ArcSoft DTS Decoder…
a02 Downmixing multi channel audio to stereo…
a02 Encoding AC3 <448kbps> with libAften…
a02 Applying -8.06dB gain…
a02 Creating file "Hobbit2_stereo.ac3"…

That’s a lot.

I’ll do a 7.1->5.1 WAV encode and then use that to downmix to a stereo encode and see if clipping is any different.

Based on that, maybe try setting FFDShow to 32bit Integer. And make sure your soundcard is set to highest bit depth too (likely as high as 24).