Gold Connectors make some more noise, the reason they use the TiO2 gold plating is because of corrosion. But then i sugguest you just solder them, thats even better then gold.

Mjah i don't really believe in those golden ears, mostely they just hear different 'subtle' changes but in reality it is just nonlineair distortion because of amplifier limitations.
Those people must have just terrible nightmares when they go visit a recording studio and see that the audio already has been trhough miles of cheap audio cables and not plated connectors etc etc.

Yet i have to admit that sometimes the volume remastering could be done better.

I take golden ears with a grain of salt, but I'm sure there are some people (albeit extremely few) who are naturally 'talented' at listening, just like any other aspect of life. I'd personally hate to have golden ears because I'd be spending even more than I already do on audio hardware. Even worse is that most of these people have perfect pitch, which I've heard that people who are really good at that have issues listening to music which is 'in tune with itself' but not using A=440 (eg, A=436).

And in regards to the mastering, I agree the biggest problem these days is the engineer behind the desk and not the equipment they use. 

There is a very noticeable difference between a 320 Kbit  MP3 and the Original(recording) and anyone who says they can't hear the differenceis just plain Deaf. I think you may be talking about 320 Kbits MP3 and CD in which case you are mostly right  they do sound similiar but a CD sounds slightly better.

Lossless codecs are used for video diting you do not want to edit in MPEG ever though lots of people do. There are errors in even in lossless codecs all a lossless codec(huffyuv or wavelet compression) means is that the coefficients will equal zero or that you can in fact recover the full image.

Leo-J is only slightly right. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD do suffer from slightly less artifacting than DVDs on an SDTV but overall the difference between the two in 480i is very nominal and not always present depending on how well the studio encodes the DVDs. Also the new DVD standards allow for ATSC support which does make a difference in terms of color but you wouldn't be able to notice that on NTSC or PAL. They use MPEG and otehr lossy codecs for archiving in fact it is very good for that. You can acheive very close replicas with lossy codecs but because of their structure they suck for editing.

Take MPEGs for example It is at its core  a discrete cosine transform(JPEG[Iframe]) where the next frame adds values ot the coefficients that change in the previous frame(P Frame) and than the next may add values to the coefficients that change in the previous and next frame(B frame). the result with the correct quantizier and bitrate can be artifact free but when trying to slice the video up it losses the previous or next frame and since the coefficients do not add to zero data is loss making it a crappy codec to work with when you intend to make a lot of changes and do tons of cuts.

does anyone here even remember when dvds were first introduced? get a clue already... the first dvd player i got was $1200, though luckily i got a five finger discount, and Air Force One was $39.95. it took 11 months for Air Force One to sell 100,000 copies. market penetration for BLU-RAY/HDDVD is a helluva lot higher. why don't you just go discuss Pokemon or something else you actually understand.

@vizunary, if you also remember , dvd were a gigantic advance over vhs; size, clarity, replay, longevity. hd-dvd, and blueray, both lack major differences from dvd. you have image and storage size. so now on blueray and hd-dvd, we can have all the extra features on 1 disk, and not 2 dvds, gee wiz im so amazed. if they really wanted to boost quality, they would release it on HD disk with 35mm full prints, would look great on monitors, and each time you got a new TV it would look better.

It's amazing that people bitch about a new movie format coming out like 10 years since the last one, yet they don't bitch about game systems coming out every 4-5 years. Hddvd picture gives you 2,073,600 pixels per frame vs Dvds 345,600, Hddvd sound gives you 1.5Mbps data rates vs Dvds 448Kbps, Hddvd gives you 30gb (51gb next year) vs Dvds 8.5gb, Hddvd gives you internet features and iHD interface dvd does not. Looks like a gigantic advance to me. 

So I passed one of those cheap movie bins at the supermarket today. I picked up a movie for 2 bucks. And that's why I say screw you DVD. Until you're movies are as cheap as my 2 dollar VHS purchases, you can go to hell!

2 bucks? Man...I can get them for a dollar...

Anyway, the fact that this many people are happy with DVD and don't want Blu-Ray or HD-DVD is proof that this is not the same as VHS vs DVD. I was happy to pay a bit more for DVD stuff because it was so much better. For these HD formats, I don't want to pay anything more than I pay for DVDs...

what you cant find 2 dollar dvds, have you never been to walmart? 2 dollar and 1 dollar movies, also relatively new movies 4.50.

what gets me is they never seem to do this with video games, would it bo so unreasonable to liquidate old video games at a discount, say 12 bucks?

I saw a copy of head coach in one of my local walmarts (we have 24 in 30 min of where i live, all but 2 are supers, and all of them 2 hours) and it was 24.99

@BenKenobi88

That may be true now, but when you get a 720p or 1080p 32" or bigger HDTV, u'll say otherwise to HD. I can't go back to normal dvds now. hehe. using my component cable for dvd, it now looks like shxt compared to the HD DVD. :) (and recently, i've been paying less than $14 dollars each for an HD DVD so pricing is not so far off from DVD when HD DVD promotions are going on) :D

Check out the "Resolution Comparison" and drag that bar right and left to compare DVD vs. high def:

http://www.warnervideo.com/warner_bros_hi_definition/us/html/hi_def.html