oh, but JBL knows how to make speakers, DD. we have them at "my theatre" and they are simply awesome. the 8 Hz stuff probably isn't real on the dvd, though--in the case of Dolby SRD, they're probably an artifact of a bad transfer of the AC3 stream. don't know enough about dts to make that assumption, though.
and yes, i'm thinking of ditching the pioneer now. it doesn't match, and it's ugly to boot.
JBLs are my favorite raw drivers to build around, for most uses.
Oh, you could be right about there being some artifacts included in my stream and I understand their spec is from 20Hz to 20kHz, but the low frequencies are there, as coherent waveforms, during the cannon blasts in
Master and Commander (I fucking love that movie!). Whether these Low Frequency Effects were actually recorded or just processed with a subharmonic generator, I don't know. It actually causes a little nausea in the sweet spot, even though my subwoofer system is about fifteen dB down from specs at eight Hertz. My calibration charts only go to sixteen Hertz, though, so I'm kind of interpolating decibels, below that. The only problem I have with my set-up is that my enclosures, which are designed to optimise a certain bandwidth, unload the drivers at around twelve Hertz. It's a good thing I don't have close neighbors, sometimes.
I have seen some artifacts which may be like you're talking about though. There are often similar noises, not really tones, that start and stop suddenly on the scope, with no fade out on many soundtracks. They also look more like clipped sawtooth waveforms than sine based. I think compression and de-compression will always be a problem, no matter what they do.
