Friday, 3 January 2020

North by Northwest (1959)

The original mono mix has been unavailable on home video since the LaserDisc era, and I'm not too fond of the 5.1 remix that replaced it.

Between the Criterion and MGM LaserDiscs (CC1226L and ML102228, respectively), the Criterion is superior. The MGM claims to have the opening music in stereo, but that's really stretching it--the score here has definitely been remixed (it's a lot clearer), but there's very little actual stereo separation, suggesting that the instruments weren't each recorded to individual tracks originally.

More importantly, the MGM has some bad EQ; voices are shrill and hiss is louder without being accompanied by additional detail, so the entire film sounds rather thin.

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