First, it has the same dreadful issues that affect the audio on StudioCanal latest blu-ray of The Third Man -- the extreme high frequencies are ~untouched, but the frequencies at which the bulk of the dialogue exists have been mucked around. Everything now sounds boomy, undetailed, and often quite unintelligible. Given that Svensk Filmindustri's other restored audio tracks don't sound anything like this, I'm going to assume this is StudioCanal's doing.
Second, it plays about 0.7 semitones lower than the Criterion DVD, the Criterion blu-ray, and the Tartan DVD with its PAL speed-up removed.
The Tartan DVD sounds like nothing was done to reshape its sound in any way. Far more natural sounding, but also a few pops and ticks here and there, and (unfortunately) some damage every now and then. This damage usually lasts for a split second at a time, but it sometimes obscures dialogue. Even more unfortunately, though, the track seems to have transfer issues as well: every 10 or 15 minutes, there's an unusually loud pop (one that is certainly intrusive), followed by two or three seconds of no sound.
The old Criterion DVD is pretty good. Some of the high frequencies that exist in the Tartan have been removed, but there are no transfer issues and the aforementioned sporadic bits of damage have been repaired (still faintly audible, but much less so).
The Criterion blu-ray audio is just the Criterion DVD with its upper frequencies lopped off. Much more muffled and dead-sounding. (I really don't understand why anyone would bother cleaning up the Criterion DVD even more -- it's very clean already.) But it's better than the StudioCanal, I suppose.
No comments:
Post a Comment