hairy_hen said:
In other words, theatrical DTS has a design flaw, and I figured out how to cover it up. ;)
Nice!
Since I'm doing this in Pro Tools, my specific method (a combination of iZotope Ozone and the program's own Downmixer plugin) may not specifically apply to what other people are using, but I can try to help in finding settings that yield the correct results. It is very important to get this right, or else we won't be hearing the level balance of these mixes the way they ought to sound. I think I've finally figured it out, and I want to make sure we all know how to do it properly.
I'm going to check out the Star Wars DTS files again and try out a revised crossover emulation. I came to similar conclusions when I first started working with these files, there was just far too much information in the LFE channel for it to sit right with me. My initial processing reflected this and as I performed 'non-spec' processing on the LFE channel, stepping down from 80Hz to 60Hz with a dB reduction along the way (I forget my exact figures as it was over two years ago). This yielded much better results, but wasn't perfect. The current state of my mixes is very basic processing, as the feedback I got seemed to want that more than a rebalance. One comment I received was that my older version of ANH was lacking the 'punch' of the version TeamBlu used on their release, when the only difference was I had adjusted the LFE to only contain more relevant frequencies and reduced the overall volume to something more in line with a home release to match better the existing Dolby 5.1 and 2.0 surround tracks. Given your information here, I think I'm going to go back and take another look. Thanks for this information, hairy_hen, I'm still relatively new to this kind of sound work (I'm primarily music production and live sound, all in stereo!), so I may have some questions for you soon. It seems at some point I lost sight of the fact that we don't have DTS theatrical audio systems in our homes, something that I was emphatic about that when I first started with cinema DTS. You are absolutely correct about getting this right. ;)