David Singleton's Diary

Today at the Vicarage The

I have followed the bleatings on the Krimson news guestbook over the new Eyes Wide Open DVD. Some of these go beyond a general commentary, and are a direct assault on the work ethics and standards of DGM. It has been suggested that :

"They started with SIX discrete channels of info and worked it down to four, they went from 5.1 surround to 4.0, JUST TO SAVE TIME. Do you think clarity was loss? I do"

I was party to many of these decisions, and the words "Just to Save Time" do not form part of the vocabulary of DGM – hence the endless nights dedicated, not to saving time, but to improving the music.

An artistic decision was made to put no music in the bass channel. This decision did not save any time. A bass channel existed and could have been added to the disc without it taking a second longer.

The bass channel is intended for unique bass information - such as rumbles on films. It is not intended to be used for the low end of instruments, which would far better remain placed where they belong. Machine did offer the option of a channel containing low frequencies derived from the bass drum or bass guitar, but this was not used as the majority of home theatre systems automatically route such low frequencies from the other channels to the sub speaker, and this doubling up could have resulted in serious phase cancellations - possibly causing a complete absence of bass frequencies.

All the bass frequencies are there – They have been left as part of the four distinct channels with which they belong. This is the perfect scenario, and will give the best listening experience. Those systems which do not have full range speakers will automatically compensate by using bass management to create a bass channel, compensating for what has been lost.

The bass channel is present and working perfectly. We chose to use it to play silence.

The centre speaker, contrary to some postings, does not play silence. There were indeed problems reading the disc, but we stayed up half the night overcoming these. The speaker is used sparingly, but at chosen moments - spoken word in Elektrik, Synthesized voice in PTB.

The mystery of the reversed stereo continues. We have checked the original files and it was correct when it left DGM soundworld.