I am very intrigued by PaulIsDead's idea of creating a new 5.1 mix from various sources. Having just gotten a subwoofer, I'm particularly interested in what you'll be doing with the bass content. The 2004 mix is an abomination, there's no doubt about that--and one of its most significant problems is that everything is overly bass-heavy--but from careful listening and comparison to other mixes, I don't believe the LFE track itself is the problem. The apparent bass-heaviness of the mix actually seems to come from the main channels, where it sounds to me like many individual sound effects were heavily EQ'd towards the low end prior to being mixed, which gives the entire movie a distorted, nasty sound. I would agree that most of the 2004 sound should be shunned; but I wouldn't necessarily rule out the possibility of using getting bass content from the LFE track. The Alderaan explosion and Millennium Falcon flybys do sound pretty nice . . .

I don't really know whether the '97 5.1 mix contains the same LFE, since I've only heard it in stereo, but I'd imagine so (although probably not as loud). I seem to remember reading that in making the '97 mix Ben Burtt and his team created new LFE that hadn't been there originally, so who knows how "authentic" to the '77 six-track the bass really is, but it sure does sound cool. I'd sure like to be able to watch the original edit of the movie while retaining that sort of low frequency stuff. ;)

I've been toying with the idea of creating a new 2.1 mix for each film, using the '93 tracks and editing the LFE from the special editions to synch up. I'm not sure if I have to capability to do that, though; the things I've tried so far haven't been entirely cooperative.