It plays more like a "Coming Attractions" trailer for American Gramaphone's video offerings. There's some interesting stuff here, like the "Visualizer", an on-screen real-time, six channel spectral analysis of the program audio, or the fact that this disk has both Dolby Digital _and_ DTS audio tracks. (It clued me that the default settings for my DVD player disabled DTS, and [eventually] allowed me to hear the difference between these competing formats.) Now for the bad news.
Navigation is a mess, some features don't work as advertised, and other things that I'd expect are strangely missing from this presentation. Examples include:
- Some menu selections don't appear to do anything
- Unusually difficult to see what current selection is
- Cursoring past one of the icons launches a special effect sequence without pressing Enter/Select. This disaster is repeated on several screens.
- I stumbled across a Photo Gallery behind the one of the musical selections, but have been unable to return there, only the "Visualizer" display is available. The standard for the medium would be a selection made on the Features Screen and/or the "Angle" alternative video selection on most DVD players, but it doesn't work that way here.
- Audio level on DTS tracks appear about 4-6 dB lower than corresponding Dolby Digital level, making A-B comparisons difficult.
- On-disc documentation indicates that one side is DVD-Video and the other is DVD-Audio, though disk has but one recorded side.
- Visualizer shows LFE channel information is centered at 20 Hz with nothing above about 40Hz, which seems unlikely
For a true demo product, I'd expect some other calibration/setup aids on the disk such as test tones, color bars and reference sheets, and items that may illustrate the capabilities of the DVD player itself (alternate Video/angle/aspect ratios, additional audio material or languages, subtitles) would be nice. It shouldn't involve an Easter Egg hunt to find the material that is present.
In summary, I feel like I paid for a product to demonstrate the capabilities of my system, but got a flawed "test of concept" that is little more than an advertisement for American Gramaphone's revamped catalog. There's also an "ain't we something!" attitude that became annoying as frustration set in over getting even the simple stuff to work right. It's the first AG product that I regret purchasing.
