Satanika - I did as you suggested and patched over that section of Empire with the GOUT mix. It's only for a couple seconds when the Falcon is making its "attack" run on the Avenger, and even knowing where the transition is I can't hear it, so I think nearly everyone should find it quite unnoticeable. I still don't know what exactly caused that glitch, but I suspect my computer crapped out for a second when it was converting to Apple Lossless, and unfortunately I foolishly deleted the rars for the wav file before realising there was a problem. All the GOUT mixes are dialnorm'd about 4 decibels down compared to the laserdiscs, but for some reason Empire also has dynamic range compression while the others don't. But I got it to a point where it shouldn't be a problem at all.

Jonno - that review is correct that these mixes are ProLogic encoded. My concern about getting these into a workable surround format is mainly for the benefit of others who have such a setup (myself when I can afford to get a centre and rear speakers added; right now 2.1 is my system configuration). A while ago I took my gout dvd for Star Wars into Ultimate Electronics and played some of it on a 5.1 system with ProLogic 2 enabled. My impression was that a lot of the time it sounded pretty similar to stereo playback, but it just filled the room more, greater ambience, etc. Hard to describe it specifically, because it's not going to sound like the best discrete 5.1, of course. The rears made themselves known whenever there were surround cues built into the soundtrack. I couldn't actually say how DTS mode compares--shouldn't be all that different but I think it separates the channels a bit more.