Today, I was transported to that galaxy again when I finally listened to this on my receiver. Again, just the 2.0 dolby surround version muxed with the Gout video at 480kbps, and holy shit! how good it sounds. I listened to it on my repaired Pioneer 7.1 receiver ;) through a coaxial cable connected to my DVD, I only have a 5.1 configuration at the moment and I have a couple of presets I can go with, but I choose to use my Home THX modes, Dolby Pro Logic+THX, Dolby Pro Logic II Movie+THX and Neo:6 Cinema+THX. And I was blow away! not only by your efforts but I was very surprised how much better and more powerful it sounds compared to the official 192kbps, the bitrate actually made a difference on my setup, especially in the small nuances in the music and most explosions, cannot believe I haven't encoded these audiotracks with a higher bitrate before.
Anyway, I settled with Dolby Pro Logic II Movie+THX which simulates a 5.1 sound experience, the other two presets sounded very similiar but I thought this had a slight edge over the others and sounded more natural. Even though I'm familiar with all the changes in the '93 remix I had to rewind the film several times especially as the reinserted original explosions in the beginning of the film sounds so natural, so I forgot about the editing sometimes and that's a good sign of hairy_hen's recreation!
I'm actually surprised of how little response this beautiful editing work of hairy_hen has recieved, to me you have restored half of the movie experience of the original Star Wars, now it's just the video transfer left. ;)
hairy_hen said:
Actually, I wonder if it would have been better to use the '85 mix for the replacements instead of the '77. It sounds like it is an exact transfer of the 35mm version (with C-3PO's extra line dubbed on top of it), but it is reported to have wider stereo imaging than the original. I haven't actually heard it in a while (never bothered to obtain a pcm copy because I didn't think I needed it before). Seems likely the wider image would have been obtained through some kind of post-processing, so it's probably not an exact match to the '93, but it might have been closer and made it a bit more seamless. Oh well.
I hope you'll consider to try it out sometimes in the future if you happen to get your hands on a pcm capture of the '85 remix. Even though it's already fantastic in its current form, any improvements are always welcome.
Will get back to you when I've listened to your 5.1 version, I think I'll wait until I have dark_jedi's Gout v.3 in my hands, to save some discs.