What is this site?

My previous rationale for keeping this blog had to do with certain blu-ray distributors applying destructive filtering to the restored audio tracks given to them by the folks who did the actual restoration work. While this practice still annoys me, the real problem is larger and more systemic.

My new position is also easier to explain, thankfully.

Essentially:

The hiss present in the optical and magnetic soundtracks of older films is not an age-related artefact. It was present the day the film was first screened and it remains on the film today, unchanged. Hiss does not intensify with time; the sound for these movies is as hissy today as it was originally.

Hiss increases with each successive analogue generation, but it is also present in first-generation elements. Like film grain, hiss cannot be removed without removing ‘real’ information. Grain removal leaves film looking waxy and sterile; hiss removal makes a movie sound muffled and muted.

That’s it, really.

Since the late 1990s, around when the DVD era began, DVNR has been consistently condemned, but hiss reduction consistently upheld. This contradiction reflects the market’s lack of understanding of the fundamental similarity between hiss and grain, an ignorance maintained by professional reviewers too. I have yet to find a single review site that has ever—even once—mentioned that a DVD or blu-ray release has been subjected to egregious hiss reduction. On the contrary, one of the more common audio-related observations is how unfortunate it is that some hiss still persists.

This mutual lack of understanding among reviewers and consumers has only been encouraged by the fact that the vast majority of catalogue titles have not received digital home video releases that have escaped this practice. Old movies do not usually sound muffled because of their age; they sound that way because restorers and distributors think the market prefers this ‘compromise’ (and it is so much more than that) over the alternative: a slight, constant hiss that is far from overbearing and that permits the rest of the soundtrack to remain vibrant and clear, as originally intended.

The standard film restoration doc usually spends time highlighting the impressive work done to stabilise the image, perform frame-by-frame dirt and scratch removal, and regrade colour and contrast using reference sources. It then moves on to the audio segment, which usually goes something like: “See, we then got rid of all the unwanted stuff like distortion and hiss, and we were super careful not to harm any real information. The technology now exists!” They didn’t, and it doesn’t.

When it comes to sonic noise reduction, the catalogue CD market has gotten it right. Noise reduction is a BIG no-no nowadays, and altering dynamics is also condemned. But when it comes to catalogue titles on blu-ray? Sure, nuke it with noise reduction! That’s a good thing! The technology exists, they say! Make the loud parts in the soundtrack louder, sure! Re-EQ the movie to make the dialogue less thin—that won’t have any negative effect at all!

How many people have actually taken out their old LaserDiscs, DVDs, and even VHS tapes and A/Bed those audio tracks to the ones on restored blu-rays? Hardly anyone. It’s easy to do with video (use some screen captures, etc.) but cumbersome and well beyond the average person’s technical ability to do for sound. Instead, we usually just see praise for lossless audio tracks, disgust for the lossy ones, and a remark or two about how age-related artefacts no longer mar the movie’s soundtrack and distract us from the viewing experience.

In my previous explanation, I wrote about the hypocrisy of denoised lossless audio, and that spiel still stands. If you transfer an optical or magnetic soundtrack—say you even do this at 24-bit, and, hey, maybe even at 24/96 or higher—and then systematically remove or significantly attenuate all frequencies over 8 kHz, is your resultant DTS-HD MA or LPCM output still truly lossless? Would a 192 kbps AC-3 track that didn’t undergo this process of noise reduction not be more lossless, in a way?

So yes, I am absolutely insinuating that a huge chunk of the praise heaped on the lossless soundtracks of catalogue blu-rays does expose how full of shit people can be about these things. They can have a speaker/receiver setup worth thousands and a pair of golden ears to match them, but their judgement of audio usually boils down to ‘lossless = good, lossy = bad.’ If only it were that simple.

So what should you do?

This site is not a buyer's guide; I am not trying to discourage you from buying a particular release. And I'm certainly not suggesting that anyone purchase an out-of-print DVD or LaserDisc just to source a specific audio track.

The goal of this blog is documentation. I want to highlight an issue that's been allowed to persist for years (decades) without being challenged.

I am not concerned about "preservation". None of these tracks are at risk of disappearing. The analogue elements from which they were derived remain safe in the studios' archives. Deterioration is not a major concern. 

I hope my posts on the main page motivate people to contact the distributors of flawed releases, make it known that you're concerned about the use of hiss reduction or overzealous equalisation, and demand something better. Reach out to professional reviewers and point out what they've overlooked. The good ones should be receptive to feedback.

The home video market is small enough at the moment that customer feedback does matter! Do not simply request the inclusion of "the DVD track" or "the LaserDisc track"; hold distributors to a higher standard and expect them to commission new transfers of analogue audio elements as they would for video or to request from licensors a flat, unadulterated transfer of those elements. The materials exist, and digital copies of them probably do too, but it's up to consumers to show that there is demand for them.