Monday, 8 January 2018

The Apartment (1960)

The mono track on the Arrow blu-ray is carried over from the track MGM completed for their Collector's Edition DVD. It sounds very poor - no information above ~7.5 kHz. The included book confirms this: "The original mono soundtrack and 5.1 mix were produced by MGM."

The 5.1 isn't a discrete multichannel mix, but it does have slightly less hiss reduction applied.

[comparison images removed to new post]

As bad as the Collector's Edition DVD and the Arrow blu-ray sound, the earlier pre-CE DVD sounds even worse -- just as little high-end information, but also a massive upper-mid frequency boost, so it sounds extremely sharp and unpleasant. They all sound bad.

I suspect the MGM LD (ML101685) has the best sounding audio track, but I haven't heard it.

1 comment:

  1. I knew it!!!!!! HA!
    I was one who had my preorder cancelled and so have missed out entirely on this release of one of my all time favorites. Ironically I had just gotten the LD before Arrow made their announcement and wondered if the audio would be better than the old MGM BD. I had a sneaking suspicion it wouldn't be.

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