The biggest challenge will have to be how to handle the Deems audio. Do you put the shortened intros? Do you put the full video with Deems where available and subs where not? Do you provide the dub as an alternate track?
I don’t want to reveal too much about what I want to do w/ the audio just yet, but as far as the interstitials go, for now, the truncated versions are all I can use as the release containing the extended audio (brought up in the main post) has not yet surfaced as of this writing, and suddenly muting Taylor’s audio to turn on subtitles for prolonged periods is less a cohesive experience than I was planning on creating. At the moment I’m not entirely sure I would go through the trouble of cutting together a truncated version of the 2000 dub, either. I’m honestly not too fond of it and as it turns out, many other fans aren’t, either. Perhaps the dubbed interstitials could be provided as individual bonus features for those who have never even bothered purchasing any official release and want to see the original footage play out completely.
I’m curious as to how this magnetic stereo mix differs from the 1990 reissue’s amazing soundmix.
The most important sonic characteristic which sets the mag soundtrack apart from the 1990 remix is that the former is dry as a bone; absolutely no artificial reverb or post-processing effects were thrown in to “sweeten” the audio. These really are the original left/centre/right channels of theatrical audio, albeit a generation or two away from the hissy nitrate sources. The Dolby Stereo remix from 1990 was the first time since 1940 that the movie was experienced as it was originally intended, but I noticed several times in that very mix that the centre channel, for some reason, sounded noticeably more muted than the left and right, so more than several passages of music throughout the program don’t quite have as much impact as they do on the mag tracks. On top of that, in some instances, Terry Porter doubled and slightly delayed certain passages of music in the rear channels to recreate the enveloping effects Stokowski originally intended, but even when it’s properly unfolded from the Dolby Surround track, frankly, it really sticks out and draws a lot of attention to itself, and not necessarily in a good way. In the event that I get the mag tracks (again, hoping for the best), I’ll post an A/B comparison with empirical evidence to demonstrate key differences.