Burning DVD-A Discs for the TL

Wednesday January 26, 2005 at 8:28 pm | Filed under Entertainment, Gadgetry

To make the most out of the stereo in the new ride, I’m looking into creating my own DVD Audio discs (DVD-A). The system won’t recognize data discs, or MP3 discs, so I can’t just burn a heap of MP3s on to a DVD and play them. That would be the quickest way to a whole lotta music, but the people who made it were audio snobs and thought that the audio quality of MP3s would make the system not sound as good as it should. I understand this, but still, it would have been cool to have 4.7 GB of MP3s on a DVD and hit shuffle, despite the audio quality loss, however significant.

So what I’m left with is still cool, and that is to burn CD audio quality 2 channel music on to a DVD. Each disc would hold roughly 450 minutes, or 7 1/2 hours. So if I have a full batch of 6 discs in the player, I could have up to 45 hours of CD quality music going, which is longer than any road trip I’ve taken.

To make these CD quality DVD-As I’ll be using a few tools: iTunes – to rip CDs to aiff/wav format or to convert MP3s to aiffs, Discwelder Bronze – to author the DVD-A.

Then there’s the discs that I can make to take full advantage of the discreet 5.1 channel DD/DTS surround sound. These will hold less music, but at a much higher “resolution”. What I’ll do with this is extract the audio track from a regular Video DVD (for example “Guster on Ice” which we just picked up, and the rumored Sloan DVD coming out in the spring) and burn just the 5.1 mixed audio track to a DVD-A.

To make these “hi-res” DVD-A discs, I’ll use: Mac the Ripper – To extract and de-mux 5.1 audio tracks from any DVD-Video discs that I have or will be getting, and Discwelder Bronze again – to author the DVD-A.

In both cases, there a cool feature that DVD-As employ called “Groups” that are like the old Indexes on older CD players. Groups enable you to put audio tracks on a disc into smaller subsections for better organization.

For those interested there’s a whole web site devoted to the sound system in the 2004+ Acura TL.

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No Responses to “Burning DVD-A Discs for the TL”

  1. Arlen Says:
    January 27th, 2005 at 8:07 am

    I thought the iPod car adapter removed the need to burn special discs to play in the car.

  2. Jon Says:
    January 27th, 2005 at 8:53 am

    Considering how snobby the documentation for the sound system was (Joe was quoting some of it to me), I’d be surprised if there was a built in iPod doc/adapter. Not only does the iPod use compressed audio that the sound system’s designers show disdain for, but it is also known for having significantly lower sound quality in the world of portable digital audio players.

    Should I be surprised, Joe?

  3. Joe Says:
    January 27th, 2005 at 10:21 am

    Actually those quotes were from reviews of the stereo, not from teh manual. I don’t know if those guys consider themselves snobs. ;-)

    You can still hook up an iPod to the stereo via a cassette adapter or an FM modulator, but yeah, the snobs didn’t put a jack for ANY MP3 player for the same reason they didn’t allow MP3 discs to be played. This doesn’t just include iPods, since all MP3s are inferior to CD quality. We’ve already discussed the iPod sound quality on Jon’s blog. In short, I can’t hear the diff, so it doesn’t matter to me, and since my opnion is that the iPod’s interface is so far superior to other players, I’d sacrifice the minor quality thing even if I could hear the difference.

  4. Monique Says:
    January 27th, 2005 at 3:43 pm

    I love how intuitive the iPOD is and how it teams up with iTunes. I wouldn’t choose to listen to MP3s for quality audio, no matter what they’re played on. MP3s are good because of file size and they sound pretty good.

    I’ve put a few music DVDs (in 5.1 of course) on my Amazon wish list. We already have a few but I was looking around and there are so many that I’d like to add to our collection. While there I also added some DVD-Audio discs to the list. It’s a whole new world out there…we’ll need to add another media rack to the living room before too long! It’s an obsession, I know.

  5. Phinman Says:
    February 20th, 2005 at 8:47 pm

    Hey Joe. Was wondering if you were able to successfully create a DVD-Audio with Discwelder. I just bought a TL as well. I attempted to make a DVD-audio disc using ULEADs “burn.now” software which claims to be able to burn a DVD-audio disc. It burned fine but the TL won’t play the disc. I used a DVD+RW. Not sure where my problem lies. I”m willing to fork out the $100 for Discwelder but I’d like to make sure someone has had some success with it. Had any luck?

    Thanks?

  6. Joe Says:
    February 20th, 2005 at 10:52 pm

    Yes, I successfully burned a DVD-A, but it wasn’t a DVD-RW. So I can’t say that works for sure. Discwelder isn’t the most elegant of apps, but it gets the job done.