hairy_hen said:On another note: since this is the LFE thread--I was wondering if anyone who downloaded them, either in stereo or 5.1, would care to comment on their experiences with those soundtracks. How well did the bass integrate into the movie--did it enhance the movie, or detract from it, or not call particular attention to itself? How was the surround sound if you have it? I'm interested to hear folks' impressions, whether general or specific.
First of all, thanks to you and satanika for putting these together.
I was just working on my first try on ANH with g-force's script and I listened to the first 10 minutes (audio only without video) on my system to try to compare satanika's 5.1 upmix of your track to Belbecus' DC48 that I encoded with Aften at 448. Let me preface my impressions by saying that I'm much more of a video/visual guy (and sensitive to that) than an audio guy and I have a very low-end receiver and speakers in an acoustically poor room.
Your 5.1 mix seemed nice and clean and definitely discrete and the low end rumble did add to the experience (more theater-like or modern home video sounding). In comparison to your 5.1 and modern 5.1 mixes in general, the DC48 mix decoded with Prologic seemed a tiny bit muffled and a bit muddy (for lack of a better word) in terms of channels overlapping(?) between speakers with the old fashioned Prologic surround. In other words, the DC48 sounded like Prologic has always sounded to me since the time it was state of the art in home theater. There was another general, overall quality that I felt was different between the two mixes, but I couldn't really pin it down or put it into words.
Apologies to you and satanika, but for a number of reasons, I decided to do my first full mux of the (g-force script processed) movie with the Belbecus mix. First and foremost is that the video is essentially the 1993 version, so creating a disc that was faithful to the 1993 LD presentation felt right to me, as a trade off from having a more modern "discrete" mix with more prominent bass. The retro Prologic sound just sounded right. For similar reasons, I also wanted to have a version that kept the original '93 edit, without the minor edits you mentioned.
Again as I said, I admittedly don't have the best ear or the best setup, so I may have have chosen the other track more for sentimental reasons than anything technical.
Of course, I am hanging on to your 5.1 mixes, so I can always do another mux with my newly encoded video. I did have a few questions that I was meaning to ask.
I was originally under the mistaken impression that you recorded your LFE track in Sound Studio, but now re-reading the thread, I see that you have since switched to an all digital method to demux and split the channels to extract the LFE track. Can I ask what software you used for that? Was it Tranzcode, BeLight/BeSweet, HeadAC3he or something else?
Will your LFE track work with Belbecus' DC48 unedited mix (without your other custom edits)?
For satanika:
I see you used ATSurround active matrix to do the upmix. That seems to be a plugin for foobar2000 or Winamp. Did you pipe the audio through one of those or use some other method? Or is there another version of ATSurround? Can you explain your process exactly? What settings and setup did you use for the relevant applications? Did you use any of the files from the wav_to_5_1_upmixer.rar you posted earlier for the final work or other tools?
Is there a generational loss or potential artifacts created by the decoder process separating the Prologic channels? Is there is a slight degradation of the audio when comparing this multi-step process to the one step of encoding the Belbecus DC48 mix directly to 2 channel AC3? Should it be noticeable or not? Would be it be like a very mild version of the artifacts caused by re-encoding an MP3 over and over a few generations?
Please don't take any of my questions the wrong way or as any sort of criticism. My ear isn't that sensitive. I'm just honestly wondering what the answers are.
Thanks again for sharing your work and any insights you may have.