Picture or Sound, which is the most important?

Picture - absolutely. The majority of movie soundtracks have all kinds of overdriven or distorted bits in them - why waste money on top flight equipment that'll murder that, over adequate gear that's more forgiving?

Remember - pictures demand your attention more than sound when you watch a movie.

That said, I draw the line at mono VHS (mono on hifi-stereo tracks is OK though!) or analog audio Laserdisc (really that's Laservision but you know what I mean).

I'd rather have a big picture than a big sound any day of the week - but if it's subtitle only I'll leave it. With the eyesight I have I can't read them!

Looking forward to receiving my copy of Kung Pow Enter The Fist though - intentionally bad dubbing - sweet!

 

domfjbrown said;

Excellent point, and something I hadn't thought of. But when you do, yes, it does seem to be a not so good idea to have a sound system that opens the audio window wide on a lossy compressed sound effects track with some dialogue, and musical accompaniement.

Cheers

John...

 

I would say the ratio of well-produced high quality movie soundtracks to shoddy ones is higher than it is for music CDs. (Maybe not for certain types of music like classical or jazz, but even there I have my doubts...) It's generally only older, poorly mastered DVDs (from the days when the technology was new) that have obvious distortion or faults in the soundtrack. These days most movie soundtracks are very high quality.

And again, I would suggest that with a lossy compression algorithm the higher quality processor would do a better job of eliminating (at least subjectively) any artefacts of the compression system than a cheap processor. At least, this should be the case with well-designed high end processors. I'm not sure they all fall into this particular category.....

Dunc