The old Toho DVD, however, sounds better; it very likely uses the exact same audio transfer, but its high-end wasn't attenuated nearly as much. The Masters of Cinema DVD released a few years later sounds the same.
The additional 'restoration' performed by Criterion does kind of serve a purpose: the pretty audible distortion present in the Toho track is gone. ...But at a cost -- everything is quite a bit more muffled. I prefer the DVDs.
There definitely is some compression on the DVD tracks that isn't on the blu-ray ones, but (as usual) I'll point out that the zoomed-out 1.5-hour waveforms look far worse than they actually are; the extended frequency range is much more noticeable.
The Masters of Cinema DVD in sync with the Masters of Cinema blu-ray:
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