Wednesday 15 September 2021

McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971)

The high frequencies of the 1991 Warner LaserDisc audio are very rolled off. I'd say it's the worst sounding version.
 
The Warner DVD is better (the old iTunes download is the same), but the Criterion blu-ray is much better.
 
Any scene with music on the Criterion is dramatically clearer, since these scenes have less hiss reduction than the rest of the film. I'm reminded of the Criterion blu-ray of In the Heat of the Night (1967) where the level of noise reduction varies from segment to segment. (It would have been nice if the entire movie didn't have any NR.) Consequently, a handful of dialogue-driven scenes sound better on the DVD, which has uniform amount of NR throughout. The Criterion is easily the best version overall, though.
 
The Warner blu-ray's DTS-HD MA track is a lossy transcode of their DVD's AC-3 track.
 


1 comment:

  1. Which is a shame because the Warner BD has a better encode and so one would have to sync the Criterion track to it to get the best version

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