The Crucified Lovers (1954)

The audio on the Kadokawa blu-ray (carrying the 4K Kadokawa/Film Foundation restoration) is disappointing. It's not terrible, but the amount of clean-up it's received is excessive when compared to two other Audio Mechanics restoration jobs I love, Rashomon and Ugetsu. It appears to be a new transfer of the same element(s) used to create the earlier Kadokawa master. Noise has been removed reasonably carefully (much more carefully than what Gaumont and Criterion tend to do), but a fair amount of high-end detail present on the MoC DVD has also vanished. The MoC BD is worse and doesn't strike as careful a balance between noise removal and detail preservation.

For the record, the MoC DVD, which probably sounds the same as the Japanese Kadokawa DVD released a year earlier, is by no means NR-free. It might be difficult to see in the spectrals below, but its high frequencies begin to roll off around 7 kHz.

There also appear to be two authoring errors present on the Kadokawa blu-ray audio track (which is dual mono): at 00:55:38 the left channel drops out for one second, and at 00:57:21 the right channel drops out for one second. These are very noticeable with headphones, but less so with speakers.

Update: The Criterion blu-ray uses the Kadokawa track with minimal changes -- a stronger high-pass filter to further attenuate extreme low frequencies (where hum would be, if there was any to remove) and a negative gain applied to the opening and end music. Those sections are clipped on the Kadokawa and they're still equally clipped here; the high-pass filter just makes the waveform look more dynamic.