[KeithEmo]

Video is actually a rather more interesting subject than audio.

As consumers we do NOT have access to uncompressed video.
ALL video we have access to, including the video on Blu-Ray discs and 4k UHD discs, is significantly compressed.
And, if you do have the opportunity to compare actual uncompressed video to a Blu-Ray or 4k disc, you will see that there ARE visible differences.

Use your computer to generate a few seconds of true uncompressed video - especially containing sharp lines and fine print.
Take a bunch of perfectly sharp still frames and combine them into a video.
Compress it using any of the standard video compression profiles, and you will see that there are in fact significant visible differences, all of which relate to loss of detail or motion or color space compression.
You may find that the losses aren't especially noticeable, and you may be able to trade objectionable artifacts for less objectionable ones, resulting in an "overall improvement".... but there will always be fidelity losses.

Video encoders are notorious for omitting random noise like film grain that was present in the original.
(They do this because true random noise is difficult to encode, and so uses up bandwidth that "could better be used for more important details".)
However, some producers, and some fans, complain that the "film look" of the video is destroyed when the film grain is removed.
(And, if your new digital audio recording omitted the tape noise that was present on the original master tape, would you describe it as an accurate reproduction or not?)

(Incidentally, Darbee is not noise reduction..... it is a sort of dynamic color and detail enhancement process. And, no, I'm not fond of the look it delivers.)

A Lexus has better features. If you are buying a more expensive piece of equipment because it has additional features that you like, that is a good reason to spend more. I have an Oppo BDP103D player, and it has the exact same video and sound quality as my $100 Sony blu-ray player, but it plays DVD-A, SACD, MKV on thumb drives and it has Darbee video noise reduction. It has a whole slew of features that justify the price. When I bought it, they also made a BDP105D, which was the exact same player, except the specs were even further into audio overkill. I passed on that one. No point to throwing good money at sound I can't hear.



You might want to look into Handbrake. If you plan to save that video you downloaded, you can compress it to MP4 format with no real quality loss. You just need to use the proper compression scheme. In fact, if you really understand the settings in Handbrake, you can end up with a MP4 version that is *better* than the uncompressed blu-ray rip.



Too bad the testing procedures weren't!

 

[bigshot]

Generally accepted science is the Nyquist Theory, the principles of acoustics developed at Bell Labs in the 20s, and the established thresholds of human perception.

Have you done any controlled listening tests yourself? If not, get to it. You’ll understand better what we’re talking about.

When you talk about compression artifacting, there is absolutely no point generalizing unless you're going to specify the codec and bitrate you're talking about. There's blatantly obvious artifacting and there's completely imperceptible compression. Darbee is the same. It has a continuous scale from absolutely no difference to horrible over sharpening. But if used properly, it is a great tool.

Absolutism gets you nowhere in digital audio and video. "Purity" theories were great in the analogue days where every layer of processing added noise and there was generation loss. It's a whole new world with digital. You can instantly see the effect of processing in a direct A/B comparison. You can process and compress and actually come out with something that looks and sounds better than the original. I love those tools and I know how to use them effectively. If I was afraid of them, I'd be stuck with what I'm handed. No thanks!

 

[pinnahertz]

There actually was a time when 19 kHz was a problem.

The way FM stereo works - and maintains compatibility with FM mono - is interesting. FM stereo is actually delivered as two matrixed channels; a main channel which is mono L+R, and a difference channel L-R.n
A monaural tuner is able to simply play the main L+R channel without doing anything special, while a stereo FM tuner extracts the L-R channel, then does the math to derive separate L and R channels.
This way the same signal is compatible with both.
However, in the actual broadcast, the L-R channel is delivered as a signal modulated on a 19 kHz subcarrier, which is part of the main audio signal.
The tuner must demodulate and extract the L-R channel, use the result to recreate the stereo audio signal, and then filter the 19 kHz subcarrier out of the main channel.
However, FM mono tuners, built before the stereo standard existed, failed to filter out the 19 kHz subcarrier at all, and many early stereo tuners didn't do so especially well.
As a result, many vintage FM tuners included a significant amount of 19 kHz noise mixed in with the audio.
The 19 kHz noise wasn't very audible as noise..... but could often be noticed as a sort of pressure in the ear (if you walked too close to the tweeter it almost felt like a jet of air blowing in your ear).
Many tweeters in those days simply didn't reproduce it at all, while others delivered it in a very narrow beam, directly in front of the speaker, due to narrow dispersion at that frequency.....

I would agree that the value of such high frequencies as "musical content" is rather dubious.
However, good high frequency response does contribute to fidelity in some situations: for example, enabling the sound of recorded cymbals to sound "properly metallic", and helping the recorded sound of breaking glass to sound natural.
(A well recorded wire-brush cymbal should be audibly different than the hiss of steam escaping from a relief valve.)
So, if the high frequencies roll off too soon, or too sharply, it can adversely affect how natural a recording sounds.

Your FM stereo description is a bit wrong. The L-R channel is carried on a double-disband suppressed carrier channel centered at 38kHz, not 19kHz. If a 19kHz subcarriers were used modulation side bands would end up in the audio band. 38kHz was chosen because the lowest modulation sideband lands at 23kHz, above the audio band. Double sideband supressrd carrier modulation was chosen for efficiency, no bandwidth was burned up be a carrier as it is in basic AM. The 19kHz pilot, which is required to regenerate the suppressed 38kHz carrier for demodulation, is injected 20dB below 100% modulation, then taken down another 20dB by de-emphasis (yes in mono radios too). So the most 19kHz you'd get out of any FM radio would be 40dB below 100% modulation. The better stereo tuners would have included a pilot null circuit that could be aligned for another 30 to 50dB of pilot reduction. The chances of any audible 19 kHz coming out of the output is very minimal indeed, certainly far too low to be filled as "pressure". In fact, the only 19 kHz leakage problems I'm aware of have to do with it beating against the bias frequency of a tape recorder.

In my youth, I was blessed with hearing up to 23kHz (which should partly address that issue in one of your other posts), verified by the use of a sine wave oscillator in electronics lab. Horizontal fly back frequency in television drove me nuts, and the ultrasonic burglar alarms used in retail stores of the time caused me actual pain ( they ran in the low 20 kHz range). However, I built a vacuum tube – based Heathkit stereo tuner with virtually no special handling of the pilot other than a null circuit, and I was never bothered by 19 kHz from that, other than the bias beat in my tape recorder.

I disagree the 20 kHz plus is important at all for hi fidelity music reproduction in and of itself. I do believe that systems that are severely limited in high frequency response can suffer from nonlinearities causing intermodulation products that can become audible, but high frequencies themselves above 20 kHz are not audible. If good high frequency Linearity can be maintained such that Intermodulation products are kept very low, I see no need for greater than 20 kHz response.

 

[pinnahertz]

Hmmmmmm..... maybe because the methodology involved in doing so is flawed.......

We have two "widely accepted claims" about the thresholds of human perception.
Both are based on very specific test conditions.
Yet you want to generalize them to ALL conditions - without offering any sort of proof that such a generalization is valid.

I trust you aren't addressing that comment to me. I hate generalizations without qualification.

Personally, I would NOT be willing to bet $1 million that someone cannot produce a single living human being who can hear 22 kHz.
(And, no, the fact that it hasn't happened yet does not PROVE that it cannot or will not happen.)

And as I addressed briefly in my previous post, you'd have been wise not to make that bet. The fact that a high level, high frequency test tone was audible to me up to 23kHz at one point in my life means nothing in terms of that frequency and above contributing in any way to music preproduction. You are probably aware that the high end of human hearing is highly variable and depends on many factors, the big ones being age and hearing damage. The range of 15kHz detection, for example, is over 90dB across a wide population segment. That's 90dB, not 9 or so. 90. And believe it or not, that's partially correctable! But that should tell you a bit about how human hearing averages out. Young undamaged ears may detect high levels of sustained test tones above 20kHz, but over 20 years of age, that's pretty much gone already.

At best you can state that nobody has demonstrated that any of the claimed benefits have been shown to be audible in a properly designed and executed test.
(And I'll cheerfully agree with you there.)

To answer your question.... I don't specifically expect to hear anything... but I can't entirely rule it out based on the currently available evidence either.
(And, even if I can't hear it, I can't rule out the possibility that someone else will. After all, I don't have "perfect pitch" either, yet some humans do.)

Please understand that hearing high frequencies is not a binary situation. It's not "hear it or you don't", it's a question of level vs frequency vs threshold of detection. Hearing response has quite a radical curve to it, even in ideal, young, undamaged ears. But the curve gets very, very steep above 20kHz where, in fact, the threshold of hearing at the threshold of pain intersect somewhere around 140dB SPL. Pretty much no point in designing for that condition, now is there?

Perfect pitch is completely outside of this discussion. It can be developed, and then later lost. Some come by it more readily, some almost innately, others not as much. And trust me, it's not always a welcome gift. But it has nothing to do with this discussion.

 

[castleofargh]

I would like to be able to disagree with your initial statement - because I have tried to avoid claiming any conclusions whatsoever.
However, I agree entirely with your statement that "I didn't prove anything".
My only claim is that I failed to rule out the need for further testing... as has everyone else.
Actually, since people claimed to hear differences under certain conditions, it seems reasonable to suggest using those conditions as a starting point for a real test.

My only intent was to offer a counterbalance to various statements from people stating "I didn't hear any difference - so they sound the same".
I simply offered a significant quantity of anecdotal evidence that "a lot of people do seem to believe they hear a difference".
(Mostly to offset the perception that "nobody hears any differences".)
In terms of preference and bias, as with any situation, this one was quite complicated.
Some people would undoubtedly prefer to believe that the new product sounds better; while some, who own the current product, would no doubt prefer to believe they have no reason to upgrade.
I also note that, up until that point, we had been promoting the new product based on added features rather than improved sound.....
(Of course, we have now adjusted our marketing strategy, based on those results..... we'd be dumb not to mention positive testimonials.)

In fact, I'm not claiming to have presented any evidence at all.... beyond some anecdotal evidence that suggests that actual testing MIGHT turn up something interesting.
(Incidentally, I'm also not at all convinced personally that high-res files do or do not sound audibly different... and neither I nor anyone else has done what I consider to be sufficient testing to prove the point either way.)

However, when the discussion shifts to the question of whether all DACs sound audibly identical, the whole discussion devolves into fantasy.
Clearly all DACs do NOT sound the same, and all DACs do not measure the same, or even close.
(For example, one DAC I owned had a very dull sounding high-end, almost certainly related to the fact that its frequency response was -3 dB at 20 kHz.)
So the real question is whether DACs sound different IN WAYS NOT OBVIOUSLY RELATED TO DIFFERENCES IN MEASURED PERFORMANCE.
And, in order to test that question, we must predict what specific measured differences are audible.

We can't simply say "all DACs sound the same" - because obviously they don't.
We need to make a specific claim which can be tested - for example "all DACs which are flat within 0.2 dB from 20-20 kHz, and have a THD below 0.05%, and a S/N ratio above 95 dB, sound the same".
Once we have that specific claim, we can choose a bunch of DACs that meet the required criteria, and then we can see if people can tell them apart.

My experience, and that of many people I know, is that the vague claims being made by a lot of people don't seem to agree with our experience.
I've owned many DACs which had "very flat frequency response; very low noise; and very low distortion" and which still sounded distinctly different to me.
Therefore, either:
1) I (and they) must have been imagining the differences
2) the claimed specs were wrong, and real major measurable differences existed - even though the published specs said otherwise (unless you measure them yourself it's not really a good idea to accept the manufacturer's specs)
3) the claimed specs were right, but the differences were audible, and the assumption that the differences were "below the threshold of audibility" is wrong
4) there were easily measurable differences that simply don't fall under the specs we're currently measuring

I'm also going to offer an interesting example... in the form of a "thought experiment".
As with many thought experiments, this takes the idea to the absurd - but not the impossible.
I'm going to start with a perfectly clean tone burst - 200 milliseconds of a 440 Hz sine wave tone - sampled at 44.1 kHz.
I'm now going to create a really silly filter - a 440 Hz bandpass filter one billionth of a cycle wide, with really sharp skirts, centered at 440 Hz.
If I pass my my 200 millisecond tone through this filter, it will experience some (an absurd amount) of "pre and post ringing".
In fact, I may add several seconds of ringing to my original relatively short burst.
However, assuming I don't screw up, I will have altered the time/energy envelope, but the frequency, THD, and noise floor, will remain unchanged.
(I will have changed my 200 msec burst into a twenty second tone that gradually increases to full amplitude, then gradually declines to zero asymptotically, without adding THD or noise or shifting the frequency.)
I'm betting that the difference will be audible.
(Again, note that my filter has NOT altered the frequency response, THD, or noise level......)

To be totally honest here, I feel bad arguing against skepticism, when I personally believe that too many audiophiles are far too credulous.
Skepticism is always a good thing.
(However, that does extend to skepticism against ALL CLAIMS... especially against claims of negative proof... because negatives are damn near impossible to prove.)
I also agree that, in practical situations, absolutes are often not the best way to discuss things.
It's probably not a good idea for everyone to pay extra for something that 99% of the people can't hear..... unless they happen to be one of the 1%, or just prefer to buy "insurance" against the possibility.....

indeed skepticism should apply to all including ourselves, and to everything including negative results. I believe we don't hang around negative results much because most of us already know how little they prove. I don't believe many aside from the new born objectivists take failure to notice as a huge conclusive result.
there is a little conflict with that idea when my default stand is to expect no difference, but what else can I do? the open mind approach where we seriously consider and investigate everything ever claimed, leads straight to the 9th dimension of sound that no instrument can measure but some old dude in a chair claims to hear. the need to draw a line between reality and delusion is just too important in this hobby IMO. so I picked the position of the jerk who doesn't believe what people say and goes "vid or it didn't happen".

to me(and only me for me in my life) the all high res idea is very clear and not mysterious at all. I see what I can get in measurements from increasing it and changing variables. I see how different DACs deal with redbook with various approaches and degrees of success in being transparent. I can test a bunch of situations for my own gears and my own hearing, and have done it many times over the years. I'm also clear on how money is more important to me than very small doubts. something unrelated to sound but very significant to me. just like some other guy will make himself sick with insecurity, and if using highres can relax him, then obviously he should go high res. and for the guy with the crappy NOS DAC that some fool made with no or very bad filter, it's very possible that high res(or at least upsampling) will really improve things. and whatever other situation is fine. whatever is significant in somebody's life for whatever reason, that's something worth dealing with for that person.

what makes the highres issue complicated is like you suggest, how everybody seems to be asking different questions about different situations while being different people. what's worst is when after that they assume that any idea/conclusion they reach is applicable to the rest of the world and every other situations.
even within the noticeable, people tend to have very different perspectives. someone will go "I noticed that hat on that guy when we passed in the subway full of people". and even if the next day I go looking for that guy with the hat and I end up finding him, the meaning of noticeable takes a special sense. I could have walked there for 10 years without noticing that hat. or I could have seen it and not care "oh a hat, so what?". or I could have seen it and from that day on, could never not see it when I passed there. at some point I could become so obsessed that I would think I see the hat everywhere even when it's not there. or I would see another hat and assume it's THE hat. all those situations encompass "noticeable" but are night and day different when it comes to personal experience and the significance of it. so even the correlation between noticeable and significant is a delicate thing. and with highres, we're often at a point where just noticeable is hard to demonstrate. so I don't find it excessive to assume that for most people, highres is a trivial event as far as the sound of musical content is concerned. because they might still be of that opinion if noticeable was clearly ascertained. that's how much mental headroom I have on this ^_^.

 

[Whazzzup]

well thats that.

 

[bigshot]

I'm also clear on how money is more important to me than very small doubts. something unrelated to sound but very significant to me. just like some other guy will make himself sick with insecurity, and if using highres can relax him, then obviously he should go high res.

Unfortunately, there's ample evidence that high data rate audio doesn't totally deal with audiophilia nervosa. It just makes the doubt move on to a different area... Instead of sampling rate, they start worrying about jitter in their DAC or how clean the caps are in their amp. They just bounce from variable to variable, spending money and never finding total relief. The problem with insecurity is insecurity. It doesn't have anything really to do with what the person is feeling insecure about.

 

[frodeni]

Qualitative testing and statistical analysis are not mutually exclusive, but rather, if any qualitative test is to have any meaning other than biased opinion, it must be statistically significant. One result is statistically too noisy, and in fact completely meaningless.

In interpretive qualitative research, there is no usage of bias. Bias is related to positivist research, and is not used in the tradition of interpretive research. Actually, objecting to how bias is traditionally used in the nature sciences, rejecting it completely, is so comon, that there is a large number of papers dealing with it. For really good reasons. Well founded, and well argument ed reasoning.

The notion that everything needs to be statistical significant is also a highly contested argument. Also, for very good reasons. There are plenty of papers, of highly regarded scientists, that argue against the need for being statistically significant.

As for meaningless, well, what do you mean by "in fact completely meaningless"? When did meaning become a fact? How do you factually prove meaning?

Unfortunately, there's ample evidence that high data rate audio doesn't totally deal with audiophilia nervosa. It just makes the doubt move on to a different area... Instead of sampling rate, they start worrying about jitter in their DAC or how clean the caps are in their amp. They just bounce from variable to variable, spending money and never finding total relief. The problem with insecurity is insecurity. It doesn't have anything really to do with what the person is feeling insecure about.

Same thing. How do you guys even know that anyone feel insecure? Care to prove how you arrived at that conclusion? How can you possibly know what other people feel? How do you know, what caused people to feel how they do?

Just as a warning, answer with care. You also need to apply your epistemology, at the topic of this tread. Good luck with that, give the position you are pushing.

 

[bigshot]

How do you guys even know that anyone feel insecure? Care to prove how you arrived at that conclusion? How can you possibly know what other people feel? How do you know, what caused people to feel how they do?

I can do that very easily. I have a simple blind listening test that takes two very difficult passages of music to compress without artifacting and runs it though a variety of codecs and bit rates. It's a very easy way to determine where your own threshold of transparency lies. I can offer it to you to as a single lossless file containing ten different encodings, from lossless all the way down to MP3 192. All you have to do is listen to the samples and rank them from best to worst. Easy, right? If you'd like to take the test, all you have to do is tell me if you want FLAC or ALAC.

OK. Now it's time for your response. Will you agree to take the test? That depends on whether you really *want* to know if you can hear a difference. If you take the test and determine that you can't hear the difference with a particular codec and bitrate, will you stop ripping to a lossless format and use compressed audio? If not, why? Because you would feel more secure knowing that it's "lossless" regardless of whether it sounds identical or not.

My test doesn't just determine the level where compressed audio becomes audibly transparent. It also tests whether you will allow knowledge of the truth to override your insecurities about lossy codecs "throwing out something you might need". Most audiophiles just refuse to take the test because being wrong is preferable to them than knowing the truth. That shows that ego is the real force driving their decisions, not audio fidelity. I can test for transparency, insecurity and ego all with one simple test.

 

[frodeni]

I can do that very easily. I have a simple blind listening test that takes two very difficult passages of music to compress without artifacting and runs it though a variety of codecs and bit rates. I can offer it to you to as a single lossless file containing ten different encodings, from lossless all the way down to MP3 192. All you have to do is listen to the samples and rank them from best to worst. Easy, right? If you'd like to take the test, all you have to do is tell me if you want FLAC or ALAC.

OK. Now it's time for your response. Will you agree to take the test? That depends on whether you really *want* to know if you can hear a difference. If you take the test and determine that you can't hear the difference with a particular codec and bitrate, will you stop ripping to a lossless format and use compressed audio? If not, why? Because you would feel more secure knowing that it's "lossless" regardless of whether it sounds identical or not.

My test doesn't just determine the level where compressed audio becomes audibly transparent. It also tests whether you will allow knowledge of the truth to override your insecurities about lossy codecs "throwing out something you might need". Most audiophiles just refuse to take the test because being wrong is preferable to them than knowing the truth. That shows that ego is the real force driving their decisions, not audio fidelity. I can test for transparency, insecurity and ego all with one simple test.

Sure. If you dare to. Sure you want me to flaw your test? I am not scared of any testing, what so ever, rather I embrace it. I also embrace my current beliefs, assumptions, experience, and knowledge. Please, send me this test of yours, please explain it in detail, and the ethics of how you will use my results. Please describe the limits of usage, when the data will be destroyed, and the scheme you have to vet your usage of the data I supply to you? Also, describe what kind of research this is a part of, what tradition this is conducted within.

Also, please note that I hardly can tell any difference on sound quality using certain USB ports on my laptop, differences between uncompressed and lossy compressed. I just don't. Guess what my results will tell you. Give some thought.

As for you proving any insecurity, that is plain out false. You have not even established any correlation in any form with any insecurity. You simply have not even found any valid prove of any insecurity. None. It is all in your head. Which is kind of ironic.

If I do this test of yours, how do I know that you will publicly refrain from using it to mock me, making all sort of false claims of what I supposedly feel? Who will vet your claims? What makes them capable to vet you? In what tradition will you be vetted?

So great! Send me this file of yours. This is going to be great fun. Just not the fun you expect it to be.

 

[bigshot]

The single ground rule is that you can only listen. No opening up the file and peeping at waveforms. Normal listening levels the same way you listen to music normally. If you cheat the test, you're only cheating yourself. (People have tried and it doesn't work. I will be able to tell.) You can listen on any equipment you want.

You rank the ten samples from best to worst. Discerning the degree of artifacting is as important as discerning lossless vs lossy. You send me your list. I send you back your results in PM. It won't be published or publicly discussed unless you want to. This isn't about ego. It's about you finding out the truth for yourself. Only you and I will know. If you discuss the test publicly, then I will discuss your results too. If you don't, I won't. PM me and I'll send you the file.

 

[frodeni]

The single ground rule is that you can only listen. No opening up the file and peeping at waveforms. Normal listening levels the same way you listen to music normally. If you cheat the test, you're only cheating yourself. (People have tried and it doesn't work. I will be able to tell.) You can listen on any equipment you want.

You rank the ten samples from best to worst. Discerning the degree of artifacting is as important as discerning lossless vs lossy. You send me your list. I send you back your results in PM. It won't be published or publicly discussed unless you want to. This isn't about ego. It's about you finding out the truth for yourself. Only you and I will know. If you discuss the test publicly, then I will discuss your results too. If you don't, I won't. PM me and I'll send you the file.

Oh boy. Sure. What ever.

Just answer the questions, particularly the one about how you know what other people feel.

If you cannot behave like a scientist, do not pretend to know how to.

 

[Strangelove424]

Video is actually a rather more interesting subject than audio.

As consumers we do NOT have access to uncompressed video.
ALL video we have access to, including the video on Blu-Ray discs and 4k UHD discs, is significantly compressed.
And, if you do have the opportunity to compare actual uncompressed video to a Blu-Ray or 4k disc, you will see that there ARE visible differences.

Use your computer to generate a few seconds of true uncompressed video - especially containing sharp lines and fine print.
Take a bunch of perfectly sharp still frames and combine them into a video.
Compress it using any of the standard video compression profiles, and you will see that there are in fact significant visible differences, all of which relate to loss of detail or motion or color space compression.
You may find that the losses aren't especially noticeable, and you may be able to trade objectionable artifacts for less objectionable ones, resulting in an "overall improvement".... but there will always be fidelity losses.

Video encoders are notorious for omitting random noise like film grain that was present in the original.
(They do this because true random noise is difficult to encode, and so uses up bandwidth that "could better be used for more important details".)
However, some producers, and some fans, complain that the "film look" of the video is destroyed when the film grain is removed.
(And, if your new digital audio recording omitted the tape noise that was present on the original master tape, would you describe it as an accurate reproduction or not?)

(Incidentally, Darbee is not noise reduction..... it is a sort of dynamic color and detail enhancement process. And, no, I'm not fond of the look it delivers.)

I have been lucky enough to work on uncompressed film masters in my career, with files large enough to saturate ethernet connections to the server. With a nice IPS monitor, it is a beautiful thing to behold, especially if the movie is an animated one. The gradients stand out particularly, perfectly smooth and organic. I never noticed such a startling difference with live action films, which have the resolving limitation of lenses and sensors to deal with. But with computer animated movies rendered uncompressed from software... wow.

 

[bigshot]

Oh boy. Sure. What ever.

Just answer the questions, particularly the one about how you know what other people feel.

If you cannot behave like a scientist, do not pretend to know how to.

Didn't I already answer that? Do you want to take the test? Feel free to say no. If you don't want to know your thresholds of perception that's fine. I know where mine is, and I would guess it isn't that different from yours. Did me pointing out that it's strictly a listening test scare you off?

 

[bigshot]

I have been lucky enough to work on uncompressed film masters in my career, with files large enough to saturate ethernet connections to the server.

I was inspired to create my home theater projection system when I was able to see The Incredibles at the Frank Wells Theater at Disney. It was very nice, but my own theater with a really good blu-ray is just as good. The only difference is the size. My theater holds about 12 people and we sit closer to the screen. The Disney theater holds about 50 and you sit further away. The end result is the same.