Just picked up my new 2007 RL Navi Blk/Ebony on Thursday and boy, what a ride! It is everything I had hoped for and more.

I have been working with the technology to personalize it and have run into a issue I hope someone has an answer for.

In setting up the audio, everything was fine until I got to the "Centerpoint" control. I click in and go to set it to the "ON" position and it will not let me do it. It is set to the "OFF" position and will not change.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

T

 

You need to have an audio CD (not an MP3 CD) active for the Centerpoint control not to be grayed out. Centerpoint is a surround-sound feature for stereo audio CD's.

 

DTS and DVD-A disc will not allow centerpoint to be turned on either. Only a regular CD allows for the centerpoint feature to be turned on and BTW it makes quite a difference in the sound, almost as if it is a DTS CD, well not quite.

 

It would be redundant on a DVD-A or DTS b/c the whole point is to make a multi-channel recording sound as if it's in surround sound.

So, a 2 channel, stereo audio CD will emulate a surround sound DVD-A.


My big question is why won't it do that for an MP3???

 

My understanding is format. There is extreme compression in mp3, witness 70 minutes of music on a cd, versus hours of music using mp3s on a 700 mb CD.

I have not done the research into mp3, but what little I know about CDs, is that the 44.1 kHz 16 bit sampling rate on CDs pales in comparison to the 20 or 24 bit DVD-A which yields a much higher resolution, etc, But of course, that comes at the expense of space (4.7 GB on a DVD vs 700 MB on CD). DVD-As in a true 5.1 format typically use 96kHz/24bit sampling, and for stereo only, can go as high as 120 kHz/24 bit sampling rate. DVD-As can also use mixed sampling rates, one for the front channels and maybe a lesser rate on the rear surrounds.

My point is, speculatively, with no real research, is that the Centerpoint is not programmed, for lack of a better term, to parse out six channel sound from the mp3 format. mp3s are far more compressed than CDs, so I am guessing there would be less than satisfactory result trying to get six channels worth of information out so small a file.

My two cents