I really dislike the 5.1 mix, the only audio option offered on the blu-ray. It sounds like Warner just took the mono mix and overlaid some of the music multitracks, but that's probably an overly reductive dismissal. It just sounds pretty bad overall -- the music is too loud and there's definitely quite a bit of noise reduction applied, so the vibrancy (especially in strings) of the original mix is gone.
The mono mix was included on the Warner special edition DVDs and various Warner R2 pre-special edition DVDs (but not the R1 pre-special edition Warner DVD!). The SE DVD sounds like the latter but with more noise reduction. The mono on the old DVDs sounds lovely -- free of digital tinkering and much more immediate sounding than the remix. I mean immediate quite literally; the musical sequences have a nice, live sound to them, with the singing and tap dancing actually feeling like they're being emitted from the actors onscreen, whereas the 5.1's music sounds removed and non-diegetic.
Unfortunately, the old DVD mono has clicks (most of which look and sound like digital clicks to me...) every 30 seconds or so, so I had to declick the entire film manually.
No comments:
Post a Comment