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Hi,
Do we know which version of SVP has the best mix ?
DVD half-rate DTS used to be absolute reference back in the day, but I can't find any info on if the audio mix was subsequently tampered with on blu-ray and UHD.
Did anyone ever analysed the tracks and looked for filtrering and reduced dynamics on the DTS-HD and the Atmos ?
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The LD was always better than the DVD for me
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Info about the audio from Wildcat remux.
On the audio side we wanted to make sure this release was truly fully featured from top to bottom. The very tastefully done reimagined and remixed Dolby Atmos presentation is of course front and center but we went the extra mile to preserve and include the original 1998 audio, as the film was heard at the time of its release and the many awards that ensued. We personally enjoy the original 6-track digital mix a bit more than the new Atmos/7.1 remix, but both are great so you really can't go wrong. The studio opted on using the compatibility track for the new Atmos mix to double as the original sound mix but there is no mention of that. But we checked it against the first issue NTSC DVDs from 1999, both the DTS and AC-3 discs and it's the same mix, as was the 24-bit lossless version of it on the 2010 Blu-ray. Normally we'd praise this and have even done it ourselves before in a previous release, but given the availability of the original mix in lossless quality here it would be redundant and not in the spirit of what the compatibility track should be for in this case: a "compatibility" fallback of the new Atmos mix's 7.1 substream. So that's what we did, and encoded a new high quality full-rate Blu-ray profile DD+ 7.1, with an embedded DD EX 5.1 core so even the compatibility of the new mix can sound its absolute best on this iconic soundtrack. Also repaired is the improper truncated audio on the original 5.1 mix which got abruptly cut off with about 15-20 seconds left of music and fade at the very tail end of the end credits which is now fixed as well precise sync to the UHD BD. Re-encoded back from 24-bit PCM stems to DTS-HD MA using the latest encoder from Xperi. And last but not least, the 1998 4-2 matrix Dolby Stereo SR mix printed optically on all 35mm prints along side the DD and DTS of which many would have heard the film that way in 1998. The track was included only on the 1999 LaserDisc and DVD releases and we only had access to the DVD so it'll have to do for this extra. Given the conversion from film to video that DVDs go under varying telecine methods, it was very difficult to undo the telecine drift on this particular track due to the periodic frame dropping and duping, but it at least ran at an identical NTSC tempo to all Blu-ray releases. We painstakingly fixed this on a Pro Tools DAW and optimized the asset with pre-processing filtering and spectral recovery before re-encoding back to Dolby Surround 2.0 using the best studio encoder. We did so with 64kbp/s of padding to offset any perceptual loss. We considered FLAC for relative losslessness but decided against it as bloat, not to mention the compression process the AC-3 coding/bitstream decoding does indeed mimic some of what the cinema processor's Cat. card circuit does with a compander like quality. It definitely sounds better now than the DVD track, as we applied a light Dolby A "trick" on the track among other pre-processing optimizers after sync.
