1985 Embassy LaserDisc [30315]: Excellent sound. Plenty of bass and high-frequency detail, and clearly pieced together from the best surviving elements that have been used for every track since. The ~middle 55 minutes have less hiss than the rest, and I'm relieved the surrounding bits weren't rolled off to better resemble the middle.
1995 Pioneer LaserDisc [PSE94-55]: The transfer notes proudly state, "The film was transferred from a 35mm duplicate negative. The sound was
also restored and attempts were made to reduce distortion, pops, hiss
and effects." The left channel contains the theatrical mix and the right channel the isolated score. The left channel is massively hiss-reduced and bass-boosted, yet no more so than the average modern mastering. It sounds more like the blu-ray than the Embassy laserdisc - extremely muffled.
1997 HBO DVD: Same mastering as the Pioneer but with warmer EQ. I suspect the later MGM DVD is the same, but I haven't confirmed this.
2013 Warner Blu-ray: Most of the bass and what little background noise that survived on the Pioneer LD/Warner DVD have been removed, so the film sounds thin and dead. The engine rumble in the early plane scene has largely vanished. The artefacts around 13 kHz indicate this is probably a lossy transcode too, but as always I must emphasise that's not why it's garbage.
The Embassy LaserDisc is in my opinion one of the finest sounding audio tracks for a classic film I've heard. It's important to stress, though, that the oddity here isn't that the later editions sound so bad (this is very much par for the course given the contemporary mastering ethos of removing noise); it's that an NR-free track sourced from good materials was ever released in the first place.
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