MatthewA

Stereo TV shows in Mono

A recent thread on Knight Rider Season 4 had me thinking about the absence of the original stereophonic sound on many TV show DVDs. The first two seasons of The Golden Girls are an infamous example.

The only other ones who goofed in this respect that I know of are:

Punky Brewster, Season 2 (all but 1 episodes are mono and sound badly distorted, especially the use of the letter "s" in the theme song; some still have the "in stereo where available" graphic intact. One episode, "Urban Fear" is stereo but sounds to me like fake stereo with very poor separation, and is pretty compressed to boot). I have no NBC broadcasts of this show to compare it to.

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Season 1 (which I don't own).

Are there any other snafus like these?

However, there is one thing I was also thinking of. "Garfield and Friends" was broadcast in stereo on CBS, but the DVDs are in mono. I listened to my CBS broadcasts from the final 2 seasons and to me they sounded like fake stereo, thus a mono presentation of this show would be correct.

I hate fake stereo remixes (especially on Fox's older, mono movies), and if they don't have the elements to create "true stereo" re-mixes, they should leave it alone. Even if they can, they should always have the original mixes as an option.

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Jesse Skeen

A lot of the early shows with stereo soundtracks, especially the sitcoms, had very unimpressive soundtracks. The theme songs usually sounded good, but everything else was flat, even the audience sound. Even shows like Miami Vice sounded pretty weak except when the music kicked in. The only shows I remember being really impressed with was the Japanese animated show "Voltron", which was just about the only show in stereo when we first got our stereo-capable equipment, and the Tonight Show- that did the audience sound right.

Around 1987 CBS advertised EVERYTHING in stereo (CBS StereoSound) but anything that wasn't really produced in stereo just got run through a different fake-stereo processor than the ones the local stations were using at the time. There was a syndicated thing called "Movie Greats Network" late at night that did the same thing. No wonder people even today still don't know what stereo is supposed to sound like.

Ironically the sound on TV seemed like it was really starting to improve around the same time I stopped watching it!

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