[Help] Mono Audio in 1.0 or 2.0?

[pipefan413]

Fussy dick could be the nickname for this site No worries you are in good company.

But seriously there is really not a truly wrong answer for any of this. Its one of life's little grey areas. Every answer is probably right. Depends on the person and their equipment. I've just always gone to bat for dual mono. It all ends up as a "phantom wall of mono sound" anyway but I just want the bass and dynamics if there are any.

I just pointed the whole dual mono LD thing because the views of this site concerning laserdisc capping and syncing have evolved over time. Back on the OT, the prevailing wisdom was to convert LD tracks from 44.1 to the more modern standard of 48kz/16bit. The thought was most of the soundtracks were going to be used in projects to create a custom BD (which won't allow 44.1) or that if a 44.1 MKV was played on certain hardware, the 44.1 would be incompatible.

Here on fanres we kind of slowly switched over to pure 44.1/16 (although still have a ton of legacy 48 work around) to stay as true to the source as possible. Capping both of the dual mono channels is really just extension of that thought pattern. Plays as dual mono, should stay dual mono. Realistically, I doubt anyone here, especially over say 35 years old, could tell the difference between the original 44.1 and a well converted 48. Nor would duping one channel into two compared differently to the original dual mono but these are all nits to pick. And we all crave verisimilitude here.

As for dual monos on LDs, I always assumed they same thing. That variations in LD mono tracks are source related. Anytime anything is capped from an analog source, even the same thing twice, there are going to be differences. Can't be avoided.

You're nailing it on all points. Long before I got into film preservation at all, I had my entire CD collection ripped as FLAC. Could I tell the difference between FLAC and 320 kbps MP3? Could I buggery! Was that the point? Absolutely not. It's about future-proofing and archival; if my house burns down but I have all my music backed up elsewhere, I've lost nothing apart from packaging and inlays, and I can still make lossy versions (which incidentally I do as Vorbis, because it compresses better, and yes I am probably the only person using Vorbis in 2020 maybe outside of indie video games).

I worry about things like noise shaping for instance, not necessarily because I can 100% definitely hear it on my current equipment, but because it has been repeatedly proven that my perception of high frequencies is unusually sensitive and if I were to get better equipment I would not be at all surprised if I were to notice the noise being shifted upwards. I don't earn much so my gear is mostly cobbled together crap, but I fully intend to upgrade things when I can afford to do so. If I make all my files 48 kHz upsamples with noise-shaped dither applied and then end up using high end headphones and realise that I can hear the dither noise and it's infuriating, I'm screwed. If I archive the 44.1 kHz and upsample with TPDF and no noise shaping to keep the gain more uniform and not try to shift the noise into higher frequencies, even if I can hear it, it'll likely bother me less; I find high frequencies fairly excrutiating. There's a clicky thing that I assume is meant to repel birds at a train station in the capital here, and I cannot walk near it; it's physically painful. But nobody else I've ever met has ever noticed it, nor could they hear it even when I pointed it out. But it's agony.

I prefer PCM 2.0 mono just because my Zappiti player doesn't like PCM 1.0 mono and plays the movie in fast forward (many Criterion classics for instance). So I encode these tracks in regular Dolby 2.0 mono to circumvet that. With PCM 2.0 mono, it plays fine. Go figure!

Hahaha holy crap, what the hell?! That's hilarious. But also really infuriating, I expect.

I've suspected for quite a while that something like that might be going on.  It's better to keep both channels in case they turn out to be non-identical in a significant way and one turns out to have an unforeseen advantage over the other.

Exactly! Feels highly unlikely but possible. If it's possible, then it's worth accounting for.

[Falcon]

Personally, I choose this way:
-If the L/R track are 100% identical numerically, I sacrifice a channel, to reduce the size in PCM (otherwise in flac, the dual mono size is almost the same as a mono).
-I have already had cases of dual mono on laserdisc not being identical.
Probably recorded from an analog dual mono source.
This causes variations in noise between channels, sometimes even in volume.
In this type of case, I keep dual mono.