The last act of Empire is nearly operatic in its intensity and is absolutely BEAUTIFULLY scored and PACED! It's not even the change in Vader's voice, or the pointless shot of Vader arriving, it's the total and utter DESTRUCTION of the musical flow in that scene! It's just completely and utterly ruined! For the sake of about 5 seconds of needless exposition.

It's the single most offensive change to the entire original trilogy in my humble opinion, and shows that either Lucas, or Ben Burtt (Perhaps both) haven't a CLUE about the importance of musical pacing in a scene. It's almost like they see music as a generic sound effect - you can cut and paste it all you like as long as the general feel of each piece is roughly the same. This kind of attitude towards the importance of John Williams' masterpiece(s) really is quite offensive. I would love to know his feelings when he saw this edit. This scene was scored in a way few films regrettably are these days (or even then) - it was a perfect marriage of editing, FX work, and of course musical scoring. It was at this point I realised Lucas had lost control of whatever it was he had in the first place, and he was just using the original films to play about with CGI in anticipation of the prequals.

I actually didn't mind many of the changes to Empire, but this one change rendered the Special Edition unwatchable for me. It bugs me just thinking about it. Even though the GOUT is such low quality, it's still the one I goto now for any of the films.

I'd rather watch a faded masterpiece than a cleaned-up patchwork mess of a classic film.