Watched this last night and loved it. My only concern, not a complaint, is the audio. My system is far from the best, but still a damn decent setup. Some of the early scenes were so bass heavy that they seemed to be be recorded with way too much gain resulting in clipping. It honestly was overbearing and muddy sounding. Again, not that big of a deal, just wondering what some of yalls opinions are.
I assume you are talking about the first track? That is an one for one copy of the laserdisc soundtrack. The reason why it is interesting and so bass heavy is because it was the track that was going to be used for a Sensurround release before Fox switch Alien over to Dolby SVA/70mm.
The rumor (from Disclord-RIP) goes that when Fox was remastering Alien in '95, it was the first time the movie would come with a AC-3/5.1 soundtrack on home video. After looking through the archives they found this track. Unfortunately or fortunately the track was a early test for the Sensurround format. So not only was it an early track with many small dialogue and sound effect changes but it was also super bass heavy for the Sensurround (I’m simplify this a bit). The track was so bass heavy that when the '99 DVD rolled around many people and reviews were disappoint in the lack of bass (the 99 track is another story).
So it is meant to be very, very bass heavy. The other two tracks should have more normal levels of bass and are closer to what was heard in the theaters with all the final sound refinements.
Can anyone explain why the 70mm track has been downmixed to a 4.1 mix? Didn’t even know there was such thing as 4.1.
Alex is right. The 70mm configuration at the time would be 3 front channels, two subs (aka Baby Booms) and one surround channel (most likely coming off multiple speakers). This would be a 4.2 in modern parlance, so the closest you could do is a 4.1 in a home theater environment. Later they dumped one of the subs and stereo-ized the surrounds getting us the modern 5.1.
Your surround system should duplicate the mono surround into 2 mono surrounds for a 5.1 setup. I just took the rear channel and duplicated it to the left and right so it becomes a 5.1 but still with mono surround.