Personal computing discussed

Moderators: renee, Dposcorp, SpotTheCat

 
setaG_lliB
Gerbil First Class
Topic Author
Posts: 144
Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2010 6:02 pm

Laservision!

Sun Jun 30, 2019 4:38 am

Image
Honey, I blew up the DVD!

I picked up this Pioneer CLD-D701 laserdisc player and 7 laserdiscs for $50 CAD at a garage sale last weekend. The player and discs are all in pristine condition. The lovely amber VFD is still very bright and evenly lit. Even better, the player lets me turn off the display, which I'll probably end up doing most of the time to extend its life. All of the mechanical features, including the automatic disc flipping system, work great. This player has 4 video outputs (2 composite, 2 S-Video), two analog audio outputs, and even a digital (optical) audio output. I've owned a couple of LD players in the past, but they've all been fairly basic in comparison. None of my previous LDPs had digital audio bitstreaming, nor could they automatically flip the disc at the end of a side.

The handling and playback of laserdiscs is quite something. Similar to records, really, the way the discs slip in and out of their inner paper sleeves. The discs themselves are roughly the same size as a record. An LD cover is large enough to be framed and used as mini movie poster. And the player sounds like it's about to lift off and fly around the room as it spins the 12" discs up to speed.

Image
This unit pulls 41 watts from the wall, 40 of which I'm guessing are used to spin these ginormous discs.

The audio quality is great! Of the 7 discs I received with the player, 6 had stereo PCM audio, and three of those also had 5.1 Dolby Digital. The oldest disc, from 1984, was completely analog. I piped the PCM tracks to my modest 2.1 setup via optical and thought that it sounded just as good as DVD. Plenty of dynamic range. Low-end is there, but definitely not as pronounced as it is on DVD and BD releases of the same film. Perhaps the really low bass is on the Dolby Digital track, which unfortunately I can't access. Laserdisc is weird in that Dolby Digital is actually stored on the analog audio track and cannot be passed through the optical connection. And if you try to play Dolby Digital out of the player's analog output, you just get noise out of the right channel. To retrieve the Dolby Digital data that's embedded in the right channel, you need a gadget called an AC-3 demodulator, which of course I don't have. Whatever. The digital PCM track sounds fine. Nice and balanced. Easily CD quality, as advertised.

Video quality is easily much better than what my fairly high end JVC VHS deck is capable of, but it's definitely behind DVD. No surprise there, as these giant optical discs store analog video. I still find that absolutely fascinating. You know, I wonder if it's possible to use a computer's optical drive to write 5 minutes worth of "analog" video to a CD-R and play it in a CDV-compatible player like this one. Obviously, the computer is a digital machine, but remember how you could use LightScribe drives to laser-etch pictures on discs? Would it be possible to take that idea a step further and pulse the laser in such a way that it records something that, to an LD player, looks like an analog video signal?

Anyway...

Back to LD video quality. Even though all 7 of the LDs are widescreen editions, it took me a good 10-15 minutes to find the correct combination of video scaler options in both the AV receiver and TV to finally give me a full-size image with the correct aspect ratio. Also, the final output quality seems to depend entirely on your TV's analog video handling capabilities. Laserdiscs looked wonderful on my entirely analog CRT televisions back in the day. And even though DVD and Laserdisc have a roughly similar video resolution, flat panel TVs seem to have a much harder time processing the video signal that comes out of an LD player.

However, I found that my plasma TV did a much better job of upscaling and deinterlacing the Laserdisc signal than our LCD bedroom TV. There were absolutely no deinterlacing artefacts on the plasma, even in panning shots. And this was just using the player's composite output (no s-video on the TV)!

Image
Though getting a modern TV to show Laserdisc images at the correct size and aspect ratio can quickly turn into a bit of a guessing game, it can be done. Here's a 2.35:1 LD being displayed in all of its CinemaScope glory. In fact, it looks nearly as good on this 1080p plasma as it did on my Sony Wega CRT back in the day.

On the LCD TV, the laserdisc image was severely lacking in sharpness and contrast, with the letterbox bars actually appearing grey! The image was dull and washed out. Even worse, I couldn't get the picture to fill the entire screen; at least, not without stretching the image completely out of proportion. It's on TVs like this where the advantages of DVD quickly become apparent. Even the output from a 1999 Sony DVD player, connected to the LCD via component, looked approximately 2 billion times better.

So yeah, that was my look back at Laserdisc. I had fun. It was $50 well spent.
 
JustAnEngineer
Gerbil God
Posts: 19673
Joined: Sat Jan 26, 2002 7:00 pm
Location: The Heart of Dixie

Re: Laservision!

Sun Jun 30, 2019 7:03 am

I previously owned a CLD-D701. It was prone to needing the rubber drive belts replaced fairly frequently. My current LD player is the DVL-700.
· R7-5800X, Liquid Freezer II 280, RoG Strix X570-E, 64GiB PC4-28800, Suprim Liquid RTX4090, 2TB SX8200Pro +4TB S860 +NAS, Define 7 Compact, Super Flower SF-1000F14TP, S3220DGF +32UD99, FC900R OE, DeathAdder2
 
bthylafh
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4320
Joined: Mon Dec 29, 2003 11:55 pm
Location: Southwest Missouri, USA

Re: Laservision!

Sun Jun 30, 2019 10:17 am

Now that's a good way to impress Jodie Foster. :P
Hakkaa päälle!
i7-8700K|Asus Z-370 Pro|32GB DDR4|Asus Radeon RX-580|Samsung 960 EVO 1TB|1988 Model M||Logitech MX 518 & F310|Samsung C24FG70|Dell 2209WA|ATH-M50x
 
Usacomp2k3
Gerbil God
Posts: 23043
Joined: Thu Apr 01, 2004 4:53 pm
Location: Orlando, FL
Contact:

Re: Laservision!

Sun Jun 30, 2019 4:38 pm

Panasonic LX-H670 here.
 
setaG_lliB
Gerbil First Class
Topic Author
Posts: 144
Joined: Wed Mar 03, 2010 6:02 pm

Re: Laservision!

Mon Jul 01, 2019 5:44 pm

JustAnEngineer wrote:
I previously owned a CLD-D701. It was prone to needing the rubber drive belts replaced fairly frequently. My current LD player is the DVL-700.

Yep, I've had belt and tray issues with my previous LD players.
From what I've read, the red lasers used in combination DVD/LD players do a better job of reading LDs than the infrared lasers in regular LD players. But it looks like the DVL-700 doesn't have a component video output for the DVD side. If you connect it to a modern display via composite or S-Video, do you see a significant difference between LD and DVD?

bthylafh wrote:
Now that's a good way to impress Jodie Foster. :P

:lol:
 
JustAnEngineer
Gerbil God
Posts: 19673
Joined: Sat Jan 26, 2002 7:00 pm
Location: The Heart of Dixie

Re: Laservision!

Mon Jul 01, 2019 7:13 pm

I’ve got an Oppo disc player for DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, DVD-Audio and SACD discs.
· R7-5800X, Liquid Freezer II 280, RoG Strix X570-E, 64GiB PC4-28800, Suprim Liquid RTX4090, 2TB SX8200Pro +4TB S860 +NAS, Define 7 Compact, Super Flower SF-1000F14TP, S3220DGF +32UD99, FC900R OE, DeathAdder2
 
jackbomb
Gerbil XP
Posts: 363
Joined: Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:25 pm

Re: Laservision!

Tue Jul 02, 2019 1:14 pm

I keep hoping to find a MUSE HD LaserDisc player at a yard sale or thrift store, but I know it won't ever happen. :(
Like a good neighbor jackbomb is there.

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
GZIP: On