[MeFirst]

Honestly, what's the point of all this since judging from the description of this particular video it's just people talking. Who cares what the sound quality is like anyway unless there's music involved.

To point out a few things though, there are not many standalones that record audio in LPCM, most will use AC3 so that higher video bitrates can be used. Although it is possible to use video bitrates over 8000kbs with LPCM resulting in a "non-standard" DVD, most DVD players these days won't have any trouble playing them anyway.

Also, many people assume because AC3 is a form of compression they immediately equate it to the horrible MP3 compression, which is totally different. AC3 is hardly a "crappy compressed" format, it's used on virtually every commercial DVD released (yes, AC3 is Dolby Digital). Due to the bandwidth limits of a DVD, Dolby Digital is preferred so that the higher video bitrates can be used for smoother video.

And as Kool Kat pointed out, most cable and satellite broadcasts use audio compression to begin with, so you're not getting true lossless audio right from the start. Your VCR (or Beta in this case) recorded it in LPCM of course, which is basically the same thing as plugging in your portable MP3 player to your PC and using a software audio recorder to record the music off it to WAV in real time (not that broadcasts use MP3 audio, it's just an example). So right from the beginning, the damage has already been done. Of course, recording from the VCR to LPCM keeps the audio the way it is without further compression which would be best, but when it comes right down to it, AC3 is really not a bad compression format. If it were, it wouldn't have been used by pretty much every single movie studio for the past 16 years or so.