Demonstrating why "restored" mono sounds awful, feat. THE SWORD IN THE STONE (1963)

[Dr. Cooper]

It's really strange what happened on this LD-release. Though it'd be interesting to compare the 1991-release (229 AS) to this. According to LDDB and the cover that one contains a Stereo-mix: https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/00603/229...-Stone-The

The previous 1986-release (also 229 AS) only has an analog Mono-track: https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/24999/229...-Stone-The

[pipefan413]

Yeah I've kinda fallen out with analogue only LDs out of frustration. Hopefully temporary. The problem being massive drift / desync if not recorded through my video capture card, but the noise floor on the capture card isn't that great.

I'm still trying to figure out how to adjust the speed of a drifting track as non-destructively as possible without also adjusting pitch or causing distortions because of NOT adjusting pitch. Like, Audacity will do it but it sounds crap to me.

I'm less interested in stereo tracks personally, if the film wasn't originally released like that. But I'm sure at some point I'll probably check it out anyway...

[pipefan413]

Just to really mess with us all, it looks like the PAL DVD is also mono. Just dual mono, rather than 1.0. But it's encoded as Dolby Surround, because... well, I guess we can't have a release of THE SWORD IN THE STONE without messing up something really dumb, right?

I did my usual test: invert one channel, mix down 2 -> 1, see if there's anything meaningful left. The only residual noise left after this was some whooshy phasey noises presumably from alignment not being 100% perfect before the mixdown. Everything else phase cancelled, indicating that it looks like it's all mono.

Whilst dumb, that's good news: it means we now have at least three sources for the original mono...

1. US CAV LaserDisc (I've assembled the three sides of the less ruined version of the 44.1 kHz PCM audio into a continous, 1-channel, in-sync track)
2. Early PAL DVD (sped up due to PAL, but I've resampled it to 24/1.001 fps; Dolby AC-3, 2.0, 192 kbps)
3. US Blu-ray Disc (haven't yet investigated but wouldn't surprise me if it sounds worse; Dolby AC-3, 2.0, 192 kbps)

And, I'm guessing that probably *also* means that the first US DVD has the mono as well, despite advertising "Dolby Surround".

I hate to tell you, pals, but encoding a 2-channel mono track as "Dolby Surround" does not actually make it a Dolby Surround track. I mean, technically, it does, sort of. But in practice, it's... pointless, apart from that it means you can claim the disc has Dolby Surround, even though you're basically lying.

At first glance, the Blu-ray mono just looks like a hyper-cleaned version of the DVD mono, which seems to in turn basically just be the less-ruined LD mono track but as 2.0 instead of 1.0 (since on the LD it only appears on the left channel, then right channel on side 2, then left again on side 3):



Buuuut to be fair it doesn't look like there was a whole bunch going on above 10 kHz anyway and what was there may just be noise rather than anything meaningful. I haven't done one for the fully assembled audio yet but here's side 1 again (the one on the left is the one I'm actually going to use, since the other channel is garbage):



Notice there's a gap then a chunk of blue there, so I'm guessing that the gap is pretty much where the actual soundtrack (as recorded) ends, then the blue lump is analogue artefacts like magnetic tape hiss.

Hmm.

Also: I didn't mention it before but I wonder what that gap around 900 Hz is? Is that *also* an attempt at noise reduction, of some other sort, possibly some sort of electrical hum or whatever that was picked up by the recording? I wonder.

[zoidberg]

Drift between separate capture devices is common, IIRC when I captured an analogue disc for a member here there was a drift of a millisecond every few minutes or so, can't remember if it was plus or minus. Strategic edits at quiet points are more than enough to maintain adequate sync, or you can adjust the speed of the whole audio file with the caveat that it'll be resampled which may or may not be perceptible to you in terms of quality loss.

[pipefan413]

Drift between separate capture devices is common, IIRC when I captured an analogue disc for a member here there was a drift of a millisecond every few minutes or so, can't remember if it was plus or minus. Strategic edits at quiet points are more than enough to maintain adequate sync, or you can adjust the speed of the whole audio file with the caveat that it'll be resampled which may or may not be perceptible to you in terms of quality loss.

Indeed, so the question becomes one of which method is the least destructive: a large number of tiny edits that you theoretically shouldn't hear but might, or one overall adjustment that you theoretically shouldn't hear but might?

I would like to think that a very high quality resample in something like RX would be completely transparent to just about everyone but even so, it's a whole lot of trial and error to figure out the exact amount of adjustment. I'm basically wondering if there's some way to take one waveform (in sync recording at lower quality) and another waveform (out of sync, drifting recording but at higher quality) and align the one to the other automatically by having software calculate how much speed adjustment is needed. It wouldn't surprise me if something like Premiere or Audition might do it but I have old versions that probably don't remember how to count, so...

[zoidberg]

You would be surprised what you can get away with when it comes to looping and cutting out pieces of audio

[pipefan413]

You would be surprised what you can get away with when it comes to looping and cutting out pieces of audio

Hahah. Not massively, I've used loops here and there on certain stuff (it often works well on generally confusing-to-the-ear loud noises; if anything, that to me is *more* convincing than using it in quiet sections, because the absence of chaotic noise makes it very easy to discern). But I'm also really picky and obsessive, so...

A big part of my general ethos is cutting into the PCM as little as possible and still having it work. The absolute dream resync in that respect was probably A GOOFY MOVIE: it's basically in sync with the Blu-ray so I could literally just figure out a carefully chosen offset and align it, then not cut into it at all apart from things like fades in and out at start / end / side change! But that's rarely possible of course.

Mostly though the reason I want to figure this out in some way is for THE EXORCIST, and to a lesser extent ERASERHEAD. I'd like to re-record both before I start the proper full-on editing stuff because I don't want to redo it all after I decide that actually I'm not happy with the recordings. Which I think I basically already have decided.

[pipefan413]

Update: Japanese LD is en route. Seems to have a better (read: less "improved") mono track in the right channel. Will most likely sync it to the US LD, depending on how the video looks (I might use it to insert missing frames, or use the JP LD video apart from replacing frames from the US one where there are JP subtitles).

That gap in the waveform on the better version from the US CAV LD might be a form of NR but I don't know for sure. Curious to look at the JP version in detail (it's from 5 years earlier).

[pipefan413]

Yeah so JP LD turned out to be a bit of a disaster (and an expensive disaster at that). I bought it mostly because I was under the impression that an analogue LD recording of the original mono for this film was from that particular LD (the person doing the recording supposedly not having the ability to record PCM bitstreams directly, so they recorded the analogue instead). Turns out that recording must have been from the very first US LD, unless one of the other LDs has the same sort of error on the packaging that the US CAV Masterpiece one does (claiming to be stereo when it isn't).

The version of the original English mono audio that actually is on the Japanese LD sounds extremely thin and is completely missing the first bit of the music because they lopped the Buena Vista logo off the beginning to replace it with a Japanese logo instead, but they didn't let the music play over it (it's silent, then cuts in halfway through the music for the "Walt Disney Pictures presents" text). So it's probably pretty useless to me. I'm gutted.

Compared with the less awful version of the mono from the US CAV LD, it's had all the low end hacked off the bottom and I suspect is probably the same track later used for the very first DVD in Europe, even though that's encoded as if it's Dolby Surround for some reason (as if the folk doing the encoding and the folk providing the track to encode didn't actually speak to one another).

The one small thing that I've enjoyed about it is finding that I actually quite like the Japanese version of the opening theme, it does weird things to my nostalgia muscle. I've chopped it out from the Japanese dub track, if you want to hear it throw me a PM (as long as you've been around these parts for a while as a contributing member).

[Samourai]

Nice, thank you for sharing.

What program are you using?