PM sent, and thanks for all your hard work on this Hutt.
<blockquote><p><strong>Mike O</strong> said:</p><p>Why the fuck is it so hard to include mono? Why? Do they think we're stupid and won't notice a downmix? Seriously, it's like every fucking Hong Kong release. How hard can it be to include the mono?</p>
<p>It's sad that the definitive Spaghetti Western has no decent release anywhere in the blasted world. Glad to see this is getting some press on this forum, though I wish there were a better way to organize it and search for stuff. Jay?</p>
<p>So what's the best bet for the other Leone films? My understanding is that some of the others have the same downmixed crap, which is which? Evidently the German BD of FOD is a stunner, the German release of FAFDM is good with some controversy, but both have the proper mono. I guess likewise for the Italian release of DYS? I'm figuring I should get those, pick up the unused anthology boxed set for the extras, and hope for the best?</p></blockquote><p> </p>
I hear you. It's immensely frustrating that we have to turn to a 35 year old format in order to listen to a movie's original soundtrack ... and in high quality. Make no mistake about it. If Fox/MGM had done the right thing - and included the original mono track - they still most likely would have done it wrong by giving it to us in highly compressed, lossy Dolby Digital - like the first two in the trilogy - instead of in PCM.
I understand the German releases of the first two films have their original English mono tracks in PCM (and they're supposedly region-free as well). Why can't we get that here in the States?
They'll probably just port over the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 track they've been using as the original mono track for years now. What they should do, is that they should go back to the original magnetic mono track, restore and remaster it in 24 bit PCM, and put that on the Blu-ray, either as a LPCM track (preferable) or a lossless PCM one. But there's probably a better chance of hell freezing over than that happening. Fortunately, thanks to the OP, that's much less of a problem. :)