question about the DM re-masters

[joethelion]

Ok - so I still haven't gotten around to buying a new copy of (at least) Violator

then today, I noticed that it was available on the iTunes music store, and something kinda caught me by surprise.

They made it a point to note that each album track was in stereo. Like, the title of "World in My Eyes" for example, was "World in My Eyes (Stereo)" & for the bsides, they have written "Dangerous (PCM Stereo)"

So, question #1 -> was Violator originally released in Mono? That just doesn't make sense to me...

#2 -> what the heck is "PCM Stereo"

...and if PCM stereo is any different, would you notice on their 128 standard AAC? I mean - if it was some higher quality, maybe

[BrotherLovesDub]

i bought the reissues for Violater and MFTM and I love them both. The added DVD feature is really fun to watch and its good to have the audio in 5.1. i'd say go ahead and plop down the dough for the actual discs instead of the iTunes files.

i found both discs used for 10 bones each. not bad!

don't have a clue what the PCM Stereo is but a quick google search reveals that amongst audiophiles, PCM stereo is preferred to Dolby Digital.

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What is the difference between PCM Stereo, Dolby Digital Stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1?
Contrary to popular opinion, PCM stereo gives a better sounding audio format than Dolby Digital Stereo. With PCM stereo the music is scanned at a much higher frequency than the CD standard, thus theoretically sounding better than an audio CD. Dolby Digital Stereo only uses an – admittedly very good – data compression system, which means that those signals not picked up by the human ear are not used at all.

[crank]

I want to know why they didn't do what the Cure did with their re-releases? I mean they had an opportunity to throw some live stuff on there, demos,etc

[Camiel]

On the coming remasters of A Broken Frame and Some Great Reward, they've included live stuff.

[viddy]

To dork out a bit:

PCM Stereo = (pulse code modulation) uncompressed digital audio (with two channels of sound interleaved together, to get two channels of sound at once, as opposed to two separate mono channels). This is what a CD is, this is what .wav files and .aiff files are. It is meant to accurately recreate an analog waveform, whereas Dolby Digital does not because it takes out stuff most of us won't notice. Variations of quality exist; a CD is 44.1khz 16bit, the high resolution DVD-Audio format is 192khz 24bit. Other variations of PCM are PWM and even DSD (only used on Super Audio CDs).

Dolby Digital Stereo/5.1 = compressed digital audio, stuff is taken out to reduce the size required for storing the sound. It was created for playing back film soundtracks. They fit the Dolby Digital information between the sprocket holes on the film. If you were to play Dolby Digital without a Dolby Digital decoder it would sound like bursts of white noise, sort of like a loud water sprinkler.

AAC would be like Dolby Digital, it's compressed; they take out stuff most of us won't notice to reduce the size (for downloading).

hope that helps :o