Thursday, 8 September 2016

Psycho (1960)

Hitchcock’s precise use of silence in his films ought to demand greater respect from remixing teams. If he chose not to include some sound effect in a scene, it's likely that he did so purposefully.

Unfortunately, the 5.1 mix of Psycho is often comically bad. It adds sound effects purely for the sake of having sound effects (presumably so the viewer can now be dazzled by how active his or her new surround speakers can be!).

All throughout the film, in just about every scene, new effects are present. The most distracting example is the shower scene (of course!), where creaky faucet sounds and modernised water Foley have been added needlessly.

The mono’s available losslessly on the UK blu-ray and in lossily (DTS) on the US blu-ray.

2 comments:

  1. As I am thankful the mono mix is on the US blu-ray (despite being lossy), there is one small but noticable alteration I noticed. The scene when Arbogast is killed, the part when he's stabbed on top of the stairs, the stabbing sound effect is delayed slightly compared to the DVD mono mixes and the remix (which also used the same sound effect). Just figured I'd at least mention since I haven't seen anyone else mention it before.

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  2. I'm surprised this post never saw an update for the 60th Anniversary and the whole downmixing debacle. The "original mono mix" on initial pressings was a 1-channel DTS:X fold-down.
    Thank god for Universal's replacement program.

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