Finally had the chance to rip the audio of the Japanese LaserDisc and compare it to the 5.1 mix of the DVD. Since I wanted to be “fair”, I took the 5.1 DTS track of the Japanese DVD (the AC3 tracks seems to have been encoded from the same master and hence is virtually indistinguishable from the DTS encode), put it through eac3to and decoded to a Dolby Surround Pro Logic Downmix - one time with mixing the LFE in and the other without.

I did this because it seems that’s roughly the only major difference between the mixes of the DVD and LD. If you look closely, you’ll see two peaks around minute 14 and 15 - this is the “more” of bass from the LFE at least in certain scenes which the LD version somehow lacks. Otherwise, there is nothing wrong with it - a nice and dynamic mix.

Although I have to admit that the explosions rock a little bit more on the new 7.1 mix provided by all the Blu-ray versions out there, their weird tinny acoustics totally ruins it for me.

All in all, I tend to believe that the 5.1 mix provided by the Japanese DVD and LD is probably the closest to the cinematic one whereas the 7.1 mix and especially the Dolby Atmos version has been reedited, pumped up and remixed to death.

Hence the 5.1 and 2.0 mixes are well worth preserving. I haven’t synced it so far but judging by the waveform, there are worse candidates and a few edits should do it.

http://www.bilder-upload.eu/show.php?file=35bef2-1451426290.jpg