It is a huge disappointment for me and i wish i had stuck with the DVD audio for this. I did some more tests at the weekend. First i captured a 10 minute section of TPM (beginning of the Obi/Qui-gon/Maul duel) as this had some of the worse compression. The results were exactly the same. Straight away i popped in the ESB SE laserdisc and captured the Hoth battle and there were no compression problems. So i decided to capture the whole of this side of the ESB laserdisc and the results were perfect.

Then i tested both sources again through my home cinema system. I watched a whole side of each movie. No problems whatsoever with ESB but TPM clearly has the compression

So these tests rule out player problems, capturing problems and playback problems as if there was a fault with any of the set-ups then ESB would suffer the same problems, which it didn't.

There is some good news however, i have been messing about with the TPM audio and applying a few filters in vegas and i have eliminated almost all of the DRC. It's still slightly noticeable in some places but probably only because i know where these spots are and may not be noticeable to anyone else.

Now the dilemma i have is do i bother doing a v2 of this project with this new audio track?

i'll post a short ac3 sample later so you can hear the difference between the two mixes and then you can see if its worth me redoing the whole DVD with this new mix. The main problem is that i no longer have any of the original files i used to create the disc so it would mean rebuilding it from scratch which is probably going to be impossible :(