A new one for me... Audio from "movie" DVD.

[Malcolm Boyce]

So Imperial Theatre recently hosted a showing of the '78 classic "Grease". It was for a fund raiser, and they had costume contests and the whole deal. All in all a fun time.

One thing I did run into unexpectedly was the audio quality from the DVD they used for playback. This was a licensed copy of the movie for public performance straight from Criterion in Toronto. It has the little "Dolby Digital" logo on it and everything... and it sounds awful.

Now granted, it's pretty revealing listening to anything through the Meyer kit at Imperial, but that being said, I can't imagine this thing working through anything other than small television speakers. I saw a showing of this flick at an Empire cinema when it was released during I believe the 25th anniversary and I don't remember it sounding so bad. Perhaps it got a remix for that and what I had was something "original" to 1978. I would love to have tried another version of the DVD to hear if there was any difference.

I just figured that any big budget movie would be tweaked in this day of "HiFi" video systems at home to sound like something through a decent full range sound system. Techs beware... If you run into something like this, you're not losing your mind.

[macrae11]

Possibly a stereo downmixing issue? I would find that unlikely, but it's the only thing I can think of off the top of my head. What specifically sounded so bad about it? Bad mix, or just lofi?

[Malcolm Boyce]

The mix quality was terrible. The difference between live and looped voice was almost like a comedy sketch.

That being said, the overall tonal quality of the thing, the music tracks being the obvious teller of the tale, were so far out of whack I had to aggressively EQ the thing to get it into the ballpark or reasonable. All the while fighting the imbalance between dialogue, fx and music. I know how some of these tunes should sound, and it wasn't doing any of them justice.

[macrae11]

Yeah doesn't sound like a technical issue. Distinct changes between location audio and ADR are a dead giveaway for something funky being up. If it was just balance issues I could see it being a down mix screwup or something, but....

[Malcolm Boyce]

Yeah. The really frightening thing was when the title sequence started with the Barry Gibb song and it sounded so bad. I ended up about 12db down at 80 to get the bottom end in line, and that was just the starter.

I think it's just a really bad print of the thing. I can't imagine how many others are out there waiting to catch someone.

[macrae11]

See that sounds very fishy in that it could be some type of processor issue. Particularly since it's around 80 Hz, which is typically the crossover point for theatrical subs. Seems to me that it might be the dolby 5.1 to 2.0 conversion causing something screwy there. Something to do with blending the sub channel improperly into the stereo mix. Course the dub room could also have had there sub turned down by 12dB, so we'll probably never know.