The AHN audio-track has received much bashing. Like you, I'm clueless when it comes to the surround-channel switching and the loss of the Force-fanfare during the assault on the Death Star, but it's my belief that the audio quality problems are unsolveable. It's obvious that the audiotrack was either damaged or in bad quality from the beginning, due to the indie-nature of the first film. I'm glad that they managed to improve on it as much as they did, cause in the old version, the whole soundtrack sounded like it had been recorded in a can. At least the problems have been narrowed down to a few lines now.

Furthermore, this is not the only DVD I have noticed this problem on. The exact same glitch is present on my DVD of Sergio Leone's "A Fistful of Dynamite", which is an MGM release. In the same scene, one line and be crystal clear and then the next can be muffled. Both films are getting older and technlogy has certainly changed quite a lot in all those years. So again, let's be grateful for what we do have. It is obvious that despite the drawbacks, a lot of effort was put into both picture and audio. If you ignore the colour "correction", it's actually virtually impossible to see that these films were shot 20-30 years ago. I know this is originaltrilogy.com and that the DVD's are certainly not perfect, but I think the criticism of things like the audio quality has been quite unfair. When they finally decided to restore the films for good back in '97, the picture had deteriorated so much Darth Vader was turning blue. So I'm just grateful to have these films in at least average quality!