1994 Criterion LaserDisc: Still the gold standard - it's a wonderful unadulterated transfer of the magnetic mono master.
2000 Anchor Bay DVD: Plenty of hiss reduction and much less bass than the Criterion LaserDisc. It sounds very bad, I'd say - certainly worse than the restored mono of Carrie (1976), which was already bad enough. The sync of the music/effects relative to the dialogue is slightly different than on the LaserDisc, which suggests this is a different mono mixdown. I haven't detected any content-related discrepancies, though, so it's fair to still consider it the theatrical mono mix. This mastering was probably completed in the late '90s and it's the same one that's been used across various releases over the past 21 years.
2007 Anchor Bay Blu-ray: Same as the DVD.
2013 Anchor Bay Blu-ray (35th anniversary): A poorly downmixed version of the 5.1 mix. I say poorly because some phase cancellation has occurred, so everything sounds extremely odd and muted.
2014 Shout Factory Blu-ray: A lossless version of the DVD mastering.
2018 Lionsgate UHD: The AC-3 mono track on this disc is a more competently downmixed version of the 5.1 mix with no phase cancellation.
2021 Shout Factory UHD: A lossy transcode of the DVD mastering. Funny that the previous Shout blu-ray actually was lossless! Anyway, this sounds bad because it's the same horrible manipulated DVD-era track, not because it's 'fake' lossless.
the sad thing is they didn't fix the audio issue with this one, but yet for the fourth movie they decided to restore the original stereo mix for the first time since laserdisc, as I hear the 5.1 has issues
ReplyDeleteIt's a shame that we are getting another release of Halloween with subpar audio sources used. I suggest that you send this feedback over to Shout Factory Customer Service so that they can take this information into account and hopefully address the issue in a future release. If they get enough criticism from the public regarding the quality of the audio, they may even go back and correct it in a replacement disc program. It's fantastic that this information is now out in the public domain but we now need to show that to Shout Factory so they can finally provide a definitive edition of this movie.
ReplyDeleteYou say the UHD's original Mono is lossy, but Caps-A-Holic says it's lossless:
ReplyDeletehttps://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?d1=16566&d2=16173&c=6126
The Mono is the default audio track on the disc and the kbps on it is higher than the one on the 2014 Scream Factory Blu-ray.
I can convert any lossy track to 16-bit lossless and its bitrate could exceed its authentically lossless counterpart.
DeleteNoise reduction is an inherently lossy process anyway, so the track's lossy encoding is the least of its problems, as I wrote above.
do you know anything about how the VERY first non-anamorphic DVD from 1997 sounded?
ReplyDeleteNo, I don't have it.
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