[Released] Terminator 2 CDS mix

[henners85]

Are we able to pin a post in this forum that has the entire list of CDS mix releases and the variations/adjustments made to them

So far I've seen mentioned but there could be more sources
LD 2008 US - correction 1998**
Squeeze LD US/Or Japan ?
1997 DVD US
2003 DVD Japanese
2008 Bluray/HD-DVD French releases

[dvdmike]

I'm not certain I have the first Squeeze LD but no player anymore, but at the time, I though the Squeeze LD of T2 was the best sounding of the film ever. It's possible it's the actual 5.1 mix untouched?

I have the first squeeze and a working player

[Beber]

Are we able to pin a post in this forum that has the entire list of CDS mix releases and the variations/adjustments made to them

So far I've seen mentioned but there could be more sources
LD 2008 US
Squeeze LD US/Or Japan ?
1997 DVD US
2003 DVD Japanese
2008 Bluray/HD-DVD French releases

The US LD would be 1998, not 2008.
If you want to add the PAL regions to the list, then the Ultimate Edition DVD and the Edition Finale DVD from Studio Canal, in France, also have the CDS, PAL sped-up, in lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 @ 384 kbps. And maybe the Columbia-TriStar DVD, in lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 @ 448 kbps.

[zoidberg]

I compared the DVD AC-3 to the US LD AC-3 a while back when borisanddoris sent me his bit-perfect capture. At the time I noticed that the two releases had completely different LFE tracks but never went any further with more analysis. FoLLgoTT's post got me curious so I had another look at the Live DVD AC-3. It really does seem that the LFE/subwoofer channel is stored in the surrounds.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the 'CDS' mix Live used was in fact the 70mm 6-track master and it was handled incorrectly. T2 was presented in 70mm Dolby Format 43, which is baby boom with split surround. 70mm only had the one dedicated surround track so stereo surround was stored in tracks 2 and 4, in the unused bandwidth of the baby boom (subwoofer) tracks (much like theatrical DTS). The mono surround track was a sum of the stereo surrounds for backwards compatibility with Format 42. On playback the baby boom tracks are high/low pass filtered to separate the surrounds and subwoofer, and the mono surround track is filtered to add back the missing low frequencies to the stereo surrounds.

Looking at the Live 'CDS' AC-3 track it looks like the surrounds were transferred as-is, keeping the subwoofer information, while the mono surround track was transferred as the subwoofer track, when played back on a monitor 5.1 system it would have delivered a rumble (and the higher frequencies would have been filtered out by the subwoofer's low-pass circuitry). Upon encoding to AC-3 it would have been low-pass filtered automatically. So potentially this is the untouched 70mm theatrical audio, just presented incorrectly. The US/JPN AC-3 laserdiscs which were released a year later have correct LFE channels and may be the CDS mix, but could also be the 5.1 mix used for the Special Edition laserdisc (which may or may not have been tweaked).

Low-passing the surrounds in much the same manner as a DTS APT-X100 file results in a LFE whose waveform is very similar to the US LD AC-3. After high-passing the surrounds I think the low frequencies can be restored with the information in the LFE channel. This may be an interesting experiment, as the DVD AC-3 might be slightly more dynamic than the LD.