OK, had a good look/listen to a few select scenes now.
Picture quality – best I have seen it. The forums are full of people moaning about over-use of DNR on this movie – but I can’t see any evidence of it. The problems in the image all come from the film stock used at the time. I don’t think it will ever look better than this.
Audio quality – sorry to say but the DTS 5.1 HD-MA mix is just as terrible as the versions we have heard before. No low-tones at all, making the thing sound hollow and tinny.
BUT – there is also a PCM 2.0 48k/24bit track too (which of course is uncompressed). This track sounds much better than the DTS 5.1track. There sounds much more depth and it feels more lively. The music certainly sounds much better. Now, while playing this 2.0 track I turned my amp to the surround setting and it does decode it as a surround track (so I assume it has Dolby surround info in the 2.0 stream). So, you do get a surround experience which is far better than the DTS 5.1 track.
Unless the owners of this film (and the owners of Highlander!), approach Brian and ask for a remastered soundtrack, I don't think we are ever going to get decent sound from (either) of these films :(
You can certainly have surround information in 2.0, especially in uncompressed formats such as PCM, taking advantage of hardware decoding routines like Dolby Pro Logic, SQ, etc.
Wilki Amieva wrote: You can certainly have surround information in 2.0, especially in uncompressed formats such as PCM, taking advantage of hardware decoding routines like Dolby Pro Logic, SQ, etc.
Wilki's right. A PCM 2.0 track CAN carry Dolby Pro Logic encoded audio information (minus the lossy encode factor associated with true Dolby Digital format encoding), which only requires a home theatre receiver to detect the proper flags within that audio information (or be manually set to Dolby Pro Logic decoding on some receivers) and then decode it to multi-channel surround sound.
mooghead wrote: "You can certainly have surround information in 2.0"
Its just out of phase stereo pumped out of the back speakers. Stop being so naive!!
For once, even in layman's terms, you actually make sense! :-)