I put in the 2004 dvd yesterday to remind myself what it sounded like. It's just as bad as I remembered--in fact, being able to hear it now in full 5.1, it's actually worse! Sure, some of the surround effects are interesting and it's got some good bass, but most of the movie just has this muffled, distorted quality that really ruins it. The foley tracks are consistently mixed way hot, far louder than they should be, and most of the time the music is practically buried, except for a few parts where it suddenly gets really loud. You can practically hear the faders going up and down, and it sounds ridiculous. And on the same subject, Neil S. Bulk was not kidding when he pointed out how badly the imaging was ruined by the swapped music in the surround channels. Violins coming from the front left and the back right is completely disorienting and wrong, and the people who laughed him off really demonstrated their ignorance.
I nearly laughed aloud several times at how terrible the whole thing sounded, though it was followed by the bitter reflection that over 90% of people either don't notice, don't care, or think it is actually an improvement. But then most of them are the ones who think they are getting good sound from lofi mp3's on their 10x overpriced Bose systems, so who cares anyway . . .
Obviously I haven't heard this one so I can't say for sure, but I will point out that if you aren't listening to the 2004 in 5.1, you would never know if the swapped music problem was there or not. It is very obvious in surround, but downmixing to stereo hides the problem just well enough that you won't notice it. Dynamic range compression during downmixing also obscures the problems with fluctuating volume levels. Personally, I find it hard to believe that any fix could be all that great, because the sound effects are not swapped and trying to separate them from the wrong music isn't going to work well. But then, I ain't a pro, so who knows. Still, the whole mix is so flawed that trying to fix it is a futile business; honestly, for all its problems, the GOUT video is still at least a vague representation of the original, while the 2004 mix isn't even marginally similar.
Anyway--as much as the prospect of watching the film with the 2004 audio horrifies me, image-wise this project does sound very interesting and worthwhile. Can anyone verify that it has the same frame count as the GOUT? If it does, then any GOUT-synched soundtrack could be used instead for those sufficiently motivated to re-mux it themselves. I do think the stereo and 70mm mixes got it much more right than the mono version in terms of balance, but the mono is at least a '77 authentic and still worthwhile.