The Flavor of Green Tea over Rice (1952)

The new Shochiku restoration sounds gross. The Criterion and Shochiku blu-rays have it and sound the same.

The old Tartan DVD sounds slightly better, but the even earlier Shochiku DVD sounds different--it's completely free of any digital 'restoration'.

This film sounds rough (even rougher than Tokyo Story!) and to me it's apparent that the best extant sound element (identified in the Criterion booklet as an optical soundtrack positive) really can't be cleaned up without lopping off a good amount of real detail. There's tonnes of crackle, pops, ticks, and an intermittent hum on the Shochiku DVD, but once you adjust to all that you should be able to appreciate how clear everything under it sounds.

Dr. Svet:

Stability is good. However, if you turn up the volume a bit in some areas you will notice that there is very light buzz/hiss in the high-register. This tells me that time has not been kind to this film because the actual deterioration must have been quite severe. (The audio has been fully restored, so obviously plenty of age-related anomalies were addressed). Nevertheless, the dialog is very easy to follow and the music sounds just fine.

But hey, Svet says otherwise, so I suppose I'm wrong?

Edit (27/01/2020): Added Carlotta blu-ray (Coffret OZU en 20 Films, 2019). It's the same as the others.