My first thought on hearing the mono mix was that severe noise reduction had been applied. I have to concur with pittrek’s observations that a great deal of background detail has been largely removed along with the hiss, and that the music often suffers from digital distortion artifacts as a result of the noise reduction, giving it a watery, warbling sort of sound.
The good news is that from listening to the mp3 of the raw, unprocessed track, it seems like it has potential for a better sound quality to be achieved. Whether it could turn out better than the Belbucus track is hard to say; I’d categorize them as roughly similar in terms of fidelity based on what I’m hearing right now. If the original, uncompressed audio captures are still available (preferably at 24-bit if possible) and can be sent to me, I’d be willing to take a shot at cleaning them up.
By the way, I’ve watched the SSE v1.6 all the way through, and I was very impressed with the results that have been achieved. I wasn’t too keen on Star Wars in general for a while, owing at least partially to the weird things that happened about scans and teams and so forth, but now I’m starting to get back into it again. Being able to watch the whole movie looking like 35mm film, without a trace of the SE in sight, is very rewarding. Thank you guys for making that possible.
Hairy Hen, I’ve sent you a link for the raw audio capture of the mono version.