Here is Blah-ray's excellent coverage: https://blah-ray.blogspot.com/2017/01/dekalog-1989.html

To summarize:

• The Criterion BD is pitched too low, because Criterion had to present the series at 24(23.976)fps for the US market.
  
• The Arrow BD is presented at the original 25fps. However, their audio is inexplicably pitched too high.
  
• The old Polish DVD is perfectly pitched. Plus, it has less filtering.
  

Years ago, I came across AAC transcodes of the Polish DVD. They indeed are in the correct pitch, and you can hear sounds that are filtered in Criterion & Arrow's versions. This is notable early in Episode 1 when father and son are doing push ups. As Moshrom mentioned, on the DVD track you can hear their clothes rustling. This is absent on both BDs.

Wondering if anyone has the original AC-3 2.0 mono tracks. If not, I'm happy to share the AAC transcodes. They still sound good and are already in sync with the Arrow BD.

(2023-06-02, 09:41 AM)axeyou Wrote: Here is Blah-ray's excellent coverage: https://blah-ray.blogspot.com/2017/01/dekalog-1989.html

To summarize:

• The Criterion BD is pitched too low, because Criterion had to present the series at 24(23.976)fps for the US market.
  
• The Arrow BD is presented at the original 25fps. However, their audio is inexplicably pitched too high.
  
• The old Polish DVD is perfectly pitched. Plus, it has less filtering.
  

Years ago, I came across AAC transcodes of the Polish DVD. They indeed are in the correct pitch, and you can hear sounds that are filtered in Criterion & Arrow's versions. This is notable early in Episode 1 when father and son are doing push ups. As Moshrom mentioned, on the DVD track you can hear their clothes rustling. This is absent on both BDs.

Wondering if anyone has the original AC-3 2.0 mono tracks. If not, I'm happy to share the AAC transcodes. They still sound good and are already in sync with the Arrow BD.

There are PAL dvds on rutracker that might be the right ones. Probably not much of an audible difference, if any, between the AAC transcodes but always nice to have the originals.

(2023-06-02, 09:35 PM)Yarp Wrote: There are PAL dvds on rutracker that might be the right ones. Probably not much of an audible difference, if any, between the AAC transcodes but always nice to have the originals.

Thanks, Yarp! Looks like they have two homebrew DVDs with Polish tracks.

Not clear where the tracks originated from. One is 96kbps 1.0, while the other is 192kbps 2.0. I can’t find a source on what the Polish DVD’s bitrate was, other than DVDBeaver saying it was DD 2.0. (Likely 192 kbps?)

Interestingly, my AAC tracks are >200kbps. I’d guess someone synced the original DVD AC-3s to Arrow’s BD and released it in PCM/FLAC on some private tracker. Then some other group re-encoded them to AAC on a public tracker.

I’ll compare mine against the rutracker ones once they finish downloading.

I've downloaded both DVDs above.

First up, they are both in the correct pitch. Below is a spectrogram comparison of all three tracks during the piano notes at the beginning of episode 1, inspired by a similar comparison on Blah-ray.



However, the rutracker tracks don't appear to be technically the same as the Warner DVD track. Throughout the episode, we can see the Warner DVD track has a hard cutoff at 20kHz, whereas the two tracks from rutracker both have a tiny bit of information above that.



Moshrom's spectrogram of the Warner DVD says the same:



In practice though, all three tracks sound good to my ears. I'll keep the AAC transcode for now. Again, happy to share this! Just PM me.

(2023-06-05, 09:12 AM)axeyou Wrote: In practice though, all three tracks sound good to my ears. I'll keep the AAC transcode for now. Again, happy to share this! Just PM me.

Good stuff and appreciate the spectrograms. People in general really play down how good lossy audio sounds. i've A/B'd countless TrueHD/DTS-HD/flac sources against DVDs/web-dls and compression is rarely, if ever, a factor.

Would be great to sync-it with the Arrow boxset

(2023-06-30, 11:41 AM)therobotdreamer Wrote: Would be great to sync-it with the Arrow boxset

There is already an AAC transcode of the Polish DVD synced to Arrow BD on public trackers. I can PM you.

I have the French DVD (2004) if needed
If anyone has synced the DVDs and noted the cuts, it would be nice to use tools like -edit=xx:xx:xxx,-xxxms on EAC3to to keep the AC3 audio intact

I would not mind syncing any DVD audio(s). Would request sending the entire makemkv rip (if possible).

Regards

(2023-08-25, 02:56 PM)xwmario Wrote: I would not mind syncing any DVD audio(s). Would request sending the entire makemkv rip (if possible).

Regards

Do you want full DVD (.iso)?
If so, you'll have to wait a bit because I can't upload all this from home
If you want the AC3 tracks on the other hand, I can send them quickly enough