ElectricTriangle said:
In general, the sound is just carelessly mixed and poor sounding compared to the original mix.
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Edit: found Hairy_Hen's detailed description of what is wrong on the 2004/2011 mixes: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-1977-70mm-sound-mix-recreation-stereo-and-51-versions-now-available/post/548812/#TopicPost548812
What "original mix" are we comparing to? Isn't HH's is a reconstruction?
As CatBus mentioned above, I think we do tend to hold whatever we're used to as the standard of comparison. For me that'd be the first Widescreen LDs and the original, rental Beta Hi-Fi audio for Empire (no later digital release ever sounded that big and warm to me, but it had its own issues for sure).
re: the comparison link
I feel that mp3 (and 2 channel at that) isn't the best format for comparison (imagine watching a 240-line youtube video to see the differences between blu-ray and another format). I assume the second of each pair of samples is HH's, but, probably because it's an mp3, it's not obviously superior to the DVD audio.