hairy_hen

I'm glad you enjoyed it!  And that the edits appeared to be seamless.  Out of curiosity, did you play the stereo version or the 5.1?

For Empire and Jedi, they'll be available as a bonus, if you will, to go along with this version.  They won't be the 70mm mixes, but they will be 5.1 and have similar dynamics, sound quality, and LFE support.  I just got what I needed to get to work on Empire, and Jedi is already done.  Look for all three on dark_jedi's upcoming G-Force based encodes.  ;)

Interesting, I guess I was mistaken about what resolution was needed to see it.  I think you're right that about half as much reduction would be more appropriate--the grain in the GOUT never bothered me except for a couple places where it is really excessive (the first appearance of the snowspeeders on Hoth, for example).  That and a couple others have to be video noise of some kind, but the rest of it is acceptable, and looking/thinking about it again it does seem like removing it softens the image a bit too far.  Dupe grain or not it isn't nearly as objectionable as some people seem to think.  I am strongly in favour of anti-aliasing--if the Editdroid had added that I would probably find no problems with it aside from the unavoidable DVNR smearing that all the '93 based versions have.

Sounds great!  What kind of bitrates will you be using?  The 5.1 is 448 and the 35mm stereo is 192, but what are the others?

Do you want me to send an AC3 of the mono mix using Dialnorm to bring the average volume to the same level as the others?  Its not a big deal, it would just prevent it sounding much louder than the other mixes when switching audio tracks, in case that is a concern.

How about the video bitrates?  I was playing around with a bitrate calculator yesterday and if I'm not mistaken you could probably use average rates of over 7 mbps for each film, depending on the audio, and peak rates of 8.75 or so, possibly more.  That would make the video very large, so I don't know what that would do to the layer change points.

I'll be glad to see msycamore's subtitles in action.  :)

When Leia says "Chewie, just do it" she is facing away from the camera, so it is hard to tell for sure, but after having heard the alternate line, the more strongly repeated "We have to go back!", I noticed that the movement of her mouth doesn't seem to quite match up with the line as spoken in the 35--it probably matches the other, because that could have been what Carrie Fisher actually said when they were filming.  So I'll grant that one is probably authentic.  ;)

And I'm not saying that these alternate lines just sprang up from nowhere--several of them probably were in the 70mm version.  But Starmike, who claimed to have an ESB 70mm recording, said that R2 didn't taste very good in that version also, and if that's true, it would mean that Luke saying he was lucky to get out of there in the SE doesn't represent any previous mix.  Both lines would have been recorded, but just the one may have been used in both versions originally--and then for whatever reason they went back to the line as written for the SE, rather that the funnier improvisation.  So just because a different take is used in one version, it doesn't mean that it also appeared in another, and there's no good way of telling which is which, unfortunately.

I do like the dialogue as used the 35mm mix better--the alternate ones are sometimes good but usually seem strange and wrong somehow.  I have the same reaction when hearing the mono mix of Star Wars.  So the 70 wouldn't be my preferred listening choice in any case.  I'm rather grateful for the 1993 version actually--the mixing choices of the 35 but with far superior dynamic range.  But a 70 would be worthwhile, if the authenticity issue could be sorted out with greater certainty.

I'll admit I don't know nearly as much about video as I do audio, but I was under the impression that film grain was generally too small to see in standard definition.  The 'grain' in the GOUT has always looked like video noise to me, it doesn't seem like it belongs there.  And even if it is actual grain, isn't it more likely to be excessive dupe grain owing to the films having been copied and transferred so many times?  Also that kind of noise wreaks havoc with mpeg image encoding, causing compression artefacts even at high bitrates.  Just going by those screenshots, the Editdroid does seem slightly sharper, but might even be the same kind of illusion caused by turning the sharpness control up on a tv set--it adds stronger edges throughout, fooling the eye into thinking there is more detail when there actually is not.  Turn up the sharpness too far and the picture takes on a fake and hideous appearance, but at moderate levels it could cause what's being seen here.  The description of the Editdroid, strange as it is, does say that the fine detail was sharpened artificially, does it not?

I'm not any kind of expert, but that's how it strikes me, looking at them together.  Even if the G-Force version is slightly softer, the application of anti-aliasing outweighs it for me, because the GOUT's jaggies are fairly horrific, and the difference is clearly evident on the droids in those screenshots.

I have nothing against film grain, and I like seeing it when it belongs there, but the GOUT's resolution is too low to reveal 'real' grain in my opinion, while its image noise is thick enough to be apparent even on a 12-inch screen.  That said, it's quite possible that the G-Force script removed a bit too much, and that a lesser approach to the grain reduction could give more pleasing results.

Sluggo, thanks for the 8mm recording, I listened to it this evening.  It was pretty bizarre hearing the film cut down into what essentially amounted to a "highlights" reel, lol.

Having now heard the soundtrack, I can weigh in with my opinion.  While the differences were very interesting, I still find myself disagreeing with the notion that they accurately represent the 70mm version.  They probably did derive the image from the 70mm sources, going by the pics of the Emperor being already tuned in and the missing radar dish, but I can tell you right now that the audio track on this 8mm recording is definitely its own separate mix.  It is not simply transferred from the 70mm soundtrack!

How do I know this?  Several reasons--the first of which is that the music is clearly mixed separately from the sound effects and dialogue.  There are several instances in which the music is edited and synchronised in ways quite different from how it appears in the film itself.  These edits were made specifically to accommodate the shortening of the film from its full length--they are not simply jump cuts from one shot to another, although there are numerous instances of that also.  Second, the Film Score Monthly list specifically notes the absence of tracked music from the cue "Yoda and the Force" in the 70mm version for the rebel fleet at the end . . . and the 8mm soundtrack quite obviously does contain this tracked music.  Moreover it accommodates the tracked music by shortening the cue Williams actually intended for the scene.

I haven't seen the image to go along with it, but I had a feeling as I listened that some of the alternate dialogue, such as C-3PO saying, "It's so nice to be together again," could only be present due to editorial differences in the picture.  There's no place for it in the full movie, and no mention of that scene being edited differently in the 70, either.  Interestingly, I did recognise some extra Chewbacca vocalisations that were in the SE version, and not in the 35.  It's certainly possible that some of the alternate lines, in the 8mm and/or the SE, originated in the 70mm mix; but given the obvious ways in which the 8mm is uniquely different from the others, there's no reliable way to tell which lines actually came from the 70 and which did not.  I certainly would not feel comfortable or justified inserting alternate dialogue into the film and calling it authentic--and I would say that even if the fidelity were good enough that such insertion could be done seamlessly.  As it is, the sound quality does not permit it to be done without calling attention to itself.

It looks as though reconstructing the ESB 70mm mix accurately is not yet possible, unfortunately.  If it were I'd be glad to work on it, but I don't think it would be worthwhile at this point.  That doesn't mean it isn't a worthy goal for the future, though--we just need more sources.

Regardless of what exactly it contained, one thing is clear: reconstructing the 70mm audio would be a lot of work, much more than was involved in doing Star Wars.

So . . . here's what I'll do.  I'm going to proceed as planned with the ESB 5.1 that I mentioned, which will be part of dark_jedi's newest AviSynth encodes; and if a larger attempt is made to recreate a 70mm version of Empire, I will certainly be on board, but it will be its own separate project from what I'm doing now.  I'll help with that for whichever approach is taken, whether it keeps the edit the same as the 35 or the picture is altered along with the sound.

Does it strike anyone else as odd that so many lines apparently existed in the first cut of the film but were then taken out for the 35mm version?  If you look at Star Wars, all the dialogue differences in the mono version were recorded later, but in the case of Empire, we seem to be expected to believe that a "more complete" auditory experience existed first, and was then cut down for the later wide release.  Combine that with differences in the SE not being authentic, and something just isn't adding up at all.  Hence my scepticism about the whole thing . . .

Interesting . . . judging from those visual differences, it does seem likely that the Super 8 version would correspond to the 70mm.  Even if it's not absolute proof, the similarity is great enough that it can probably be considered a reliable measure.

Now I'm torn . . . part of the idea of making the music edits was for the sake of personal preference, disliking unnecessary chopping up of music cues in films, and wanting to bring it closer to John Williams' conception of it, but if the Super 8 is what it seems, then the kind of changes involved in a possible 70mm version are different than what I was thinking of doing (I hadn't planned to alter any dialogue, for instance).  I don't think we know for sure if those music cues were actually changed from 70 to 35 or if they had always been chopped up to start with.  I keep going back and forth on whether I think it would be worthwhile to do a 'partial' 70, conforming to the 35 in length, or if any such thing should wait until someone is willing to go all the way with the visual differences.

It is interesting also that the guy who claimed to have an ESB 70mm recording specifically mentioned the lack of the line, "When we find Jabba the Hutt and that bounty hunter, we'll contact you."  Going by this I'm inclined to believe him.  He also said that R2 didn't taste very good, which would lend support to the notion that the SE differences can't be taken as corresponding to the 70.  If only we could get in touch with him . . .

Can someone point me in the direction of the audio for this Super 8 version?  I've never heard it before, but it looks like I'll need to give it a close listen.

It would probably be possible to come up with something pretty close, but recreating it exactly is out of the question without the right sources to compare it to.  I definitely don't trust the lists of differences out on the internet--I've seen numerous lists of changes in audio for ANH that I know are inaccurate, and that is the better documented film at that.

The claim that the SE mix of ESB is based on the 70mm version has been put forth many times--it seems to me that someone said it at some point and then many other people took it as gospel that it was the case, propagating the rumour.  While possible, I think it's important to remember that this claim is unsubstantiated until proven with an actual source.  Keep in mind that it is, after all, the SE--many things about the films were being altered according to the whims of those in charge, and being faithful to how it had been was hardly their priority.

From an audio standpoint, such a reconstruction would be best derived from the Definitive Collection soundtrack, since it is the best-sounding mix of the original film available, and then subsequent edits from other sources would fill in whatever changes were necessary.  How much of it would be possible while maintaining sound quality and faithfulness to the actual mix being emulated is impossible to say, since this is all just speculation at this point.  I'm sort of inclined to believe that the '93 Empire is actually closer to the 70mm version than might be suspected at first glance; but I don't have anything to back it up, other than a feeling that the mysteriously missing snowspeeder crash sound could be connected, since they were using early generation sources to make the DC version.

For my part, as a follow-up to the success of recreating the Star Wars 70mm, I'm going to make a new 5.1 for Empire, which will use the 1993 mix combined with a few segments of the SE to 'correct' the choppy music editing, and the special edition LFE channel for the low end.  This can't exactly be called an accurate 70mm recreation, since we don't know for sure what it sounded like, but it could possibly be considered an approximation of what it may have been, if you will.  In any case it should sound great.  :)

Try a program called MacPAR deLuxe.  Its primary function is to create par2 files, though I haven't yet made use of that function.  I mainly use it to extract from RAR files on my Mac, and it has never let me down.  Make sure you get the right version for your system: the newest is for Snow Leopard only, but there is one for Tiger and Leopard and another for Panther 10.3.9.

The 5.1 was RAR'd by Satanika and they should both be a little under 200 mb.  The extracted file is 388.1 mb (406,970,368 bytes).

It's funny how everyone thinks now that "that's what she said" comes from The Office, when it was originally coined by Mike Myers for a Wayne's World sketch on Saturday Night Live . . .

Anyway, I like RotJ.  Not as good as the first two films, but they really did set the bar very high.  The parts with Luke, Vader, and the Emperor are the best, and I like Luke being badass on the sail barge.  As others have said, little seeds of the SE nonsense and PT garbage can be detected, but haven't yet grown to the point of being too objectionable, so it's easy enough to overlook them.

I openly acknowledge that Belbecus' skill and knowledge in audio far exceeds mine, and the kind of work necessary to perform something like the mono mix restoration is beyond the tools and the ability available to me.  Consequently there are a few places where this 70mm recreation falls short of being completely seamless, mainly because while I can hear the parts that don't quite match up, I'm not able to make them sound closer.  Fortunately those parts are infrequent and not readily noticeable except under close scrutiny.  But I appreciate the compliments.  :)

Many of the additions to the '97 SE were things that originated in the mono mix, but hadn't been heard since the original release, since home video versions were always based on the stereo mixes.  Things like the "deceleration" sound when the Falcon comes out of lightspeed, the beeping of the gun turrets, the .44 Magnum laser, and "Close the blast doors!" all came from the mono, as well as others I can't think of at the moment.  The greater prominence of the music in the '97 mix also reflects the mono as well.  Of course, there were many other added sound effects in the SE that had never been in any version of the movie before, and some that made their first appearance in the '93 mix.

But the majority of the differences in the mono mix have still never appeared in any other version--the cantina music heard before they go inside, the alternate dialogue (Aunt Beru, stormtroopers, Death Star intercom voices, different takes of some of Luke's lines, and the complete lack of comm static and radio scrambling during the Battle of Yavin), the beeping of the intercom that starts almost as soon as Luke and Han start shooting in the cell bay, and the stormtrooper in Mos Eisley saying "How long have you had these droids?" about a second earlier, which makes it sound like Luke has to think of a good lie before replying, instead of answering immediately as he does in the stereo version.  Some of these little details add to the aural immersion, giving it a more complete and unified feeling, though some of the changes come across as strange and heavy-handed to me.  To each his own, I guess--as long as we've got them all to choose from.

Yeah, they probably should have included the 2.0 track; aside from the 4 db reduction in average volume, probably caused by AC3 Dialnorm, it sounds exactly the same as the laserdisc (a drop in fidelity from lossy compression is harder to hear than volume differences).

My computer lists the exact runtime of the GOUT as 2:01:07 (the soundtrack is 348,831,343 samples at 48 khz, if I remember correctly).  Don't know how many frames the GOUT video has, but it seems likely this would be the same.

Hey, anyone wanting to use the 70mm version has my vote. ;)

Editing to add: I agree with msycamore that the trend of not including original sound mixes is disturbing, especially since the remixes are often made by people who had nothing to do with the film's original production and think they are "improving" the film with blatant and unnecessary changes.

I put in the 2004 dvd yesterday to remind myself what it sounded like.  It's just as bad as I remembered--in fact, being able to hear it now in full 5.1, it's actually worse!  Sure, some of the surround effects are interesting and it's got some good bass, but most of the movie just has this muffled, distorted quality that really ruins it.  The foley tracks are consistently mixed way hot, far louder than they should be, and most of the time the music is practically buried, except for a few parts where it suddenly gets really loud.  You can practically hear the faders going up and down, and it sounds ridiculous.  And on the same subject, Neil S. Bulk was not kidding when he pointed out how badly the imaging was ruined by the swapped music in the surround channels.  Violins coming from the front left and the back right is completely disorienting and wrong, and the people who laughed him off really demonstrated their ignorance.

I nearly laughed aloud several times at how terrible the whole thing sounded, though it was followed by the bitter reflection that over 90% of people either don't notice, don't care, or think it is actually an improvement.  But then most of them are the ones who think they are getting good sound from lofi mp3's on their 10x overpriced Bose systems, so who cares anyway . . .

Obviously I haven't heard this one so I can't say for sure, but I will point out that if you aren't listening to the 2004 in 5.1, you would never know if the swapped music problem was there or not.  It is very obvious in surround, but downmixing to stereo hides the problem just well enough that you won't notice it.  Dynamic range compression during downmixing also obscures the problems with fluctuating volume levels.  Personally, I find it hard to believe that any fix could be all that great, because the sound effects are not swapped and trying to separate them from the wrong music isn't going to work well.  But then, I ain't a pro, so who knows.  Still, the whole mix is so flawed that trying to fix it is a futile business; honestly, for all its problems, the GOUT video is still at least a vague representation of the original, while the 2004 mix isn't even marginally similar.

Anyway--as much as the prospect of watching the film with the 2004 audio horrifies me, image-wise this project does sound very interesting and worthwhile.  Can anyone verify that it has the same frame count as the GOUT?  If it does, then any GOUT-synched soundtrack could be used instead for those sufficiently motivated to re-mux it themselves.  I do think the stereo and 70mm mixes got it much more right than the mono version in terms of balance, but the mono is at least a '77 authentic and still worthwhile.

I've double-checked once again just to be sure everything sounds the way it should, and I'm pleased to report that the 5.1 mix is now entirely finished and ready for general use.  Here are the download links from Satanika--an AC3 of 448 kbps split into two RAR files.  It should be all set to mux with any GOUT-derived video, whether you use the video as is or with your choice of AviSynth script processing.

Part 1: http://www.sendspace.com/file/qq11vb

Part 2: http://www.sendspace.com/file/jd98ys

If any of the links for this or the stereo version expire, just let me know and I'll be happy to re-upload them.  I've also updated the first post to include the download links for both so they'll be easy to find.

With two different versions of the soundtrack, there may be some potential confusion about differences between them and which one would best serve a particular type of audio setup.  I'll try to make that clear here.

The original 70mm mix featured discrete channels in what we would now probably call a 4.2 layout, with three front screen channels, a mono surround channel driving an array of speakers in the sides and back, and two channels exclusively reserved for low frequency effects, driving whatever speakers or subwoofers a particular theatre was equipped with.  The laserdisc mixes from which this recreation is derived are in a matrixed stereo format, with the four main channels folded down into two, encoded in such a way that it can be expanded or "upmixed" back into surround.  Note however that this upmixing cannot fully separate the channels from each other, and a certain amount of crosstalk between them will exist regardless of what algorithm is used.  The original discrete channel format cannot be fully recovered without an actual transfer from the source, only approximated.

Such upmixing is normally carried out by the receiver during playback, and the stereo version heard this way will deliver excellent results.  The bass content, however, will be limited to what is present in the laserdisc mix (which is not insignificant).  The 5.1 version was made in order to allow use of the LFE channel, since this was an important part of the 70mm theatrical experience.  The upmixing took place in software, with the ATSurround plugin of Foobar 2000 I believe (correct me if I misremembered that), and the LFE channel added in afterwards.  The surround experience is very similar to the results from Prologic II, and the added bass gives considerable impact to explosions and spaceship flybys, as well as some more subtle low end.  Surround effects emanate equally from both rear speakers, with additional rear stereo ambience derived from the mains.

Which one you should use depends what kind of sound system is being used.  I'll give some general guidelines:

If you are listening via 2-channel analog connection, be it the headphone jack of a computer or the stereo out of a dvd player, choose the stereo mix.  This applies regardless of whether you are using your tv speakers or large floorstanding tower speakers, and whether you have a surround setup or not.

If you have a 5.1 setup, and are bitstreaming the AC3 signal to a Dolby Digital decoder using a digital connection, or are using a multi-channel analog connection, you should definitely choose the 5.1 version.

If you use a digital connection but do not have a full 5.1 system, you should most likely choose the stereo version.  Use your choice of upmixing algorithms in your receiver to match the signal to your speaker layout if you wish.

If you have a subwoofer but less than five speakers, you may achieve acceptable results from using the 5.1 mix, but be aware that by downmixing a file that has already been upmixed from stereo, the quality of sound from the main channels will most likely be inferior to what you will hear from the stereo mix, due to phase artefacts and channel crosstalk.  Were the original discrete mix available, it could be downmixed without any significant problems, but that is not the case with this version.

(If you really want to, you could encode your own AC3 in 2.1 layout using the stereo and LFE tracks I've provided, but know going in that the playback of such a format is erratic, depending entirely on the equipment used.  My own Onkyo receiver discards the LFE channel when using Prologic II, retaining it only in stereo and DTS Neo:6 modes.  A high-end Denon receiver at a hifi home theatre store was completely incapable of using the LFE channel at all, regardless of what listening mode was used; a similarly priced Yamaha successfully used the LFE while automatically engaging THX Surround Decode, and worked in stereo as well.  I make no guarantees about going this route.)

I don't know what the surround effect of this mix is like on a 6.1 or 7.1 system, through Prologic IIx or similar algorithms.  Ideally the rear channel effects would be spread equally among all the back speakers, to simulate the monaural surround of the original, rather than being relegated to the center back speakers only, but I can't say one way or the other, having never heard it this way.

Anyway, I've gone on a bit, but hopefully these guidelines will be helpful in creating an ideal listening experience for the film.  I really hope everyone who obtains this mix will be pleased with it, and I'm very interested in hearing any opinions and feedback you might have.  Have to say I'm rather relieved at finally being finished with this--hopefully now I can just watch the film without worrying too much about the sound not being quite what I want it to be!  However close this comes to simulating the real 70mm mix, if I've improved the available sonic experience of the film for anyone, through the sound itself or from providing a look back into the film's history, then I've done what I set out to do.

Well, I'm still not 100% sure of the cause, but I've managed to solve the problem of reduced bass.  Took a while for it to occur to me, but it turned out the key was to invert the phase of the duplicated bass in the LFE channel--once I did that and re-encoded to 5.1, it sounded much closer to the stereo + LFE file I've been using for comparison.  I'm presuming that somewhere in the upmix process, the phase of these bass effects became reversed, so that it was partially cancelling itself out.  Now it combines the way it should.  The entire principle of spreading a stereo source over more speakers is based on phasing tricks, adding and subtracting the channels together in various ways, so I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that this could happen.

So, now that it's taken care of, expect to see the final 5.1 version made available soon!  It took a bit longer than I expected, but you can be assured it will all sound exactly as it should.

That looks great!  If I end up doing my own encode I will definitely use this.  The version I currently have is chopped off by overscan and is in the black bar area, so it would great to watch the film with the subtitles the way they should be.

Are you also going to do the Jedi subs?  None of those are overscanned, but I would like to see them done properly as well.

Listened to it some more and I'm pretty certain my receiver has nothing to do with it--the results are the same no matter how the settings are changed.  It has to be in the encode somewhere, but I still can't tell exactly what is responsible.  I'd estimate it's at least a 3 db difference.  Perhaps if I put more of these bass effects in the LFE channel and increase the levels I can make them come out where they should be.  Hmm . . .

Do you like having that music there?  I think the scene is improved by it--otherwise something just isn't quite right.  The music adds emotional resonance, and I don't know why they decided to get rid of it, but I'd understand if some folks didn't want it there, since no 'real' version of the movie had it.

I am a big fan of Mara Jade, and get annoyed when people impugn her worth as a character.  A fair amount of people, seemingly often prequel gusher types, rag on her for being a 'Mary Sue' and being oh so perfect and diss Zahn for making the story 'revolve around her' or some such nonsense.  I think these people suck hairy ass through a straw, frankly.  To me Mara Jade was always an intensely interesting character, deeply flawed but with enormous potential, and her practical cynicism ends up being the perfect counterpoint to Luke's idealism.  Sure, when I was young and naive I couldn't wait for her to get hers, but that was only an automatic reaction against anyone who professed to hate Luke.  Does she fit into the world of Star Wars as presented by the OUT?  Your mileage may vary.  Is she an exceptional character who makes the later stories that much better?  Absolutely.

Of course, nobody but Zahn could write her worth a damn, but then, he's one of the only SW authors I find worthwhile anyway (Brian Daley being the other).

The idea of her being Luke's love interest took me by surprise at first, but I came to see that it actually made a lot of sense.  I never remotely thought of the Jedi as being constrained against relationships, which was one of my biggest complaints about AotC and a major factor in turning me against the prequels.  (Neither do I see them as spacefaring pimp daddys.)  When I heard that she had been killed off in the recent books, I was absolutely furious.  I have a very nihilistic view of what 'counts' in Star Wars, negating the validity of anything I don't like.  Original unaltered trilogy, Han Solo adventures, Zahn books . . . everything else is just bilge.  I adamantly maintain that Luke and Mara are still out there exploring the Unknown Regions . . .

Well, I signed up for the arstechnica site to try to contact this starmike fellow, but the site won't let anyone e-mail other users, and I can't PM him either because I'm still a n00b, apparently.  "We are sorry, but you are not authorised to use this feature. You may have just registered here and may need to participate more to be able to use this feature."

I haven't the patience to troll around a site I'm not familiar with to score brownie points in hopes of getting in touch with someone who may or may not have what he claims.  But I don't want to see this possibility slip out of reach, either.  Is anyone else here a member of that site and able to get in touch with him?  If he really does have an ESB 70mm recording, it would be a great resource for the OT community, and I would certainly try to do something with it if I could.

Oh, and nice article by the way, Zombie84.  ;)

Interestingly, I found this thread during one of my daily google searches for "zombie sightings."

lol

I haven't yet done that, but it is an excellent idea and I will certainly do it as soon as possible.  I suspect it is a phase issue, because when I looked at the waveform of the LFE channel, after decoding to six mono files, it appeared to be the same as the source.  I have my receiver set for a crossover of 80 hz, so that everything below that in the main channels is diverted to the subwoofer.  This filtered bass may be partially cancelling itself out when combined with the LFE channel in these instances.  In addition to just playing the subwoofer without the main speakers, I'm also going to switch the settings so that the mains play full range and the subwoofer only plays the LFE channel and see what happens then.  It's possible that it could be a quirk of the speaker distance settings in the receiver, and that the results would be different in another room and with different equipment.

I've finally been able to listen to the 5.1 version on my sound system.  The low volume level issues I was having earlier don't seem to apply when the file is played in its native format; I was about three-quarters convinced of that already, but having looked at the waveform and listened in 5.1 mode I'm now certain that there is no DRC as I had feared.  The average volume is the same too, so no dialnorm or anything like that going on.  A very small amount of clipping occasionally occurs in the center channel on the highest peak volumes, but like the clipping I documented earlier in the '93 source, it is very brief and quite inaudible.

For whatever reason, when playing the file in VLC via headphones (which was all I could do away from home), the volume was substantially reduced, but during proper 5.1 playback this does not occur.  Add that to the potential phase issues that may arise when downmixing something that has already been upmixed, and I will add the caveat that this 5.1 mix ought not to be played without a 5.1 system.  For ideal results the stereo version should be used if such a system is not available.

Though the problems I thought were present turned out to be a false alarm, in the course of listening to the 5.1 file I discovered another issue, one which I confess has me somewhat baffled.  I made only brief mention of it earlier in this thread, but on a few occasions I used the bass effects from the 1993 mix for the LFE channel, isolating them from the rest of the mix and adjusting to an appropriate volume, in short amplifying what was already present in the '93 mix.  On my 2.1 AC3 encode, they sound the way I wanted them to sound, but on the 5.1, they seem by varying degrees to be subdued, being only marginally louder than the '93 if at all.  I don't know what is causing this discrepancy.

I have heard that AC3 encoding, being lossy in nature, may alter the phase relationships between the channels, so that what should blend together becomes less coherent.  The likelihood that this would occur with the LFE channel is greater, because lossy encoding generally devotes more of its bandwidth to the midrange, where human hearing is the most sensitive, and less to the high and low frequencies.  Bass frequencies are also more likely to interact with each other and their acoustic environment in anomalous ways.  But I can't say specifically what is causing this problem in the mix--whether it is the lossy encode of duplicated bass, or whether the upmixing caused some cancellation, or even if my receiver is simply processing the two versions differently.  The reason I used a few '93 bass effects was because I felt that neither special edition worked as well for those sounds, but it looks like I'm going to have to make the SE bass work if I want it to sound right.  Should have realised something like this could happen, but it's an area that is really beyond my knowledge, since I am not a trained professional.  Blast . . .

I don't think anyone but me would have noticed the discrepancy, since I'm the one who put this thing together (and my subwoofer is of higher fidelity than what many people generally own, indeed it is probably the highest quality component in my system), but I want this to sound as good as I can make it.  Hopefully it won't take long to fix.

Speaking of Lord of the Rings, there are reports on avsforum.com that the LFE channels of the Bluray versions have been compromised compared to the dvd's--some sort of subsonic filter around 25 hz has apparently removed all the lowest bass content, considerably reducing the impact.  This isn't a problem for most people (including me) who don't have massive subwoofers that can shake a room at frequencies well below the range of human hearing, but the folks who do have that capability are in an uproar about it.  While my bass extension doesn't go that far, I would certainly not want to buy a product that I knew had been compromised in such a way.  Hey, I might be able to get a giant SVS subwoofer someday, and I'd sure want to take advantage of it if I could!  Add what was mentioned about the DVNR and I'll stick with the dvd's, thanks.  (Of course, I don't even like the LotR films that much, because the changes from the books really annoy me, but that's a whole other story.)

The Bluray releases of Avatar as well as Master and Commander are also said to suffer from this subsonic filtering, and possibly others I haven't heard about yet.

As for Star Wars on Bluray, my view is simple: no restored original trilogy, no sale.  I'm particularly interested in the 70mm soundtracks, or close approximations thereof, and I would hope that those would be used in the audio mastering, but I won't hold my breath on that.