Andre Yoskowitz
5 Apr 2007 11:40
If you recently purchased the "Nine Inch Nails: Beside You In Time" concert disc and tried to play it in your Xbox 360 HD-DVD player you were most likely let down by the poor audio quality caused by a bug in Microsoft's audio decoding software.
The concert disc features an amazing Dolby TrueHD lossless audio track but the The Xbox 360 HD DVD player cannot output a TrueHD signal and instead downsamples the lossless stream to a lossy 640kbps Dolby Digital 5.1 mix.
However, even after being downsampled most users report that the tracks sound better than the everyday Dolby Digital track. This was not the case with the concert disc which was reported as having “static popping” and “clipping” noises, killing the experience of listening to the disc.
Fortunately for users, Microsoft has confirmed that their HD DVD team is aware of the bug and plans to address it in their next software update.
“We plan on shipping an update to the Xbox 360 HD DVD player in early to mid spring. In this update we will be adding DTS output, improved Audio, and improved title compatibility,” relayed a Microsoft employee, according to what he had heard from the Xbox team. “The variability there is that this is a software project and we are fixing/enhancing a lot of things and we want to make sure we get them right. So it is difficult to give an exact day for the update.”
Children of Men has also been giving HD DVD owners headaches, although that problem may just be a physical problem and not a hardware or software issue. Hopefully we will hear of a resolution for the audio and playback issues soon.
Source:
Dailytech