Yeah. In LD days you knew a guy had a sub because it’s required to even hear 5.1 but for DVD they had to make mixes compatible with the crappy speakers that fit into TVs that are only 2” thick and some of that stuff gets completely confused by excessive bass. Horrible waves of nonsense coming out of those little Bluetooth pieces of bleep when the low freqs get thick.

I'm sure there were plenty of folks that had invested in high-end ProLogic setups without a powered sub that just added an AC3 demodulator/decoder to their existing setup and ran 5.0...

AC3 on LD is very, very much compressed, at a fixed 384kbps to be precise.
DVD is usually 448kbps up to 640kbps.
AC3 on BluRay can't go higher than 640kbps (to keep backwards hardware compatibility I presume).

That's why they came up with DD+ (up to 6.144Mbps but a lot of online video streaming offer only 48kbps) and Dolby True HD for uncompressed lossless (up to 18 Mbps) to go beyond these limitations.

Julien

Maybe it's due to a different mix?

Spun up: English Patient, The (1996) [12047 AS]

Was very impressed with the AC-3 Dolby in this title, rears are quite active and the plane scenes sounds amazing.

The picture i thought was very very grand,

Its worth getting on LD for its price,
Im sure it was one of the first titles i got on DVD also.
Give it a rewatch GB , romantic film for your wife and yourself

Which version of The English Patient should I pick up? Regular AC3, Criterion AC3, or DTS (looks like prices ascend in that order, around $6, $15, and $35 respectively... I probably wouldn't pay the premium for the DTS)? Looks like Criterion is the same cut of the film (162 minutes), so any PQ/SQ differences (I'm guessing not)? Not a Criterion collector or a Special Features person, so only really care about PQ/SQ.

I grabbed the regular AC3 for $4 shipped.

Exactly.

Bandwidth tells you how much data you can store.
Mix tells you what data was actually stored.

And there is an endless discussion on "near-fied" (home version) and "far-field" (theater version) mixes.

LDs usually got the theater mix as-is.

Julien

The Matrix.

It's AC3 track is absolutely banging.

Ah, thanks for the information Julien!

And as ldfan mentioned Event Horizon in one of his posts... found a copy of the NTSC version for a few bucks and yes, the surround sound on this one is really good!



Indeed! I still own the first edition of the german DVD release (my first DVD!) and - compared to the LD version - it pretty much sucks. Not only because of the soundtrack - which sounds a bit dull on the DVD (both german and english audio tracks) - but also because of the picture/details. On the LD version the colors, especially the green tones, look way better. And there are a lot more details visible during dark scenes and/or backgrounds - on the DVD the same backgrounds appear rather flat and a lot of the fine details are gone. I'm missing "depth", if you will. From what I remember the LD was mastered using the theater version whereas it was remixed / remastered for the DVD release?