TCFHE Press Release: The Robe (DVD/Blu-ray) (1 Viewer)

[Alan Tully]

Those pictures look about right. There is a harshness about the old disc that brings out the grain (but I'm still not buying the new one unless they release it in R2). How does the music track sound? I have the Varese 2 disc soundtrack CD & it shows its age a bit (fair enough). It looks like they spent a lot of money on the sound, I wonder if the new isolated music track sounds better.

 

[Simon Howson]

I should've metnioned that. The music sounds really good compared to the old DVD.

On my DVD player the second audio track is the isolated music score in 5.1.

Sorry if I am boring people by continually mentinoing the chat, but Schawn from Fox said that Audio Mechanics spent an enormous amount of time correcting the soundtrack to remove the wow from the audio. Apparently it required an enormous amount of computer processing, so they could only restore a few seconds of audio each day!

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I played the 5.1 track and heard plenty of localized dialogue...

 

[Simon Howson]

Serious, maybe I just picked sections when it isn't as noticeable, I heard a lot of dialogue coming from only the centre speaker. The 4.0 track is extremely directional.

 

[David_B_K]

I hope to get the disc today, so I cannot comment on how the disc sounds, but in the chat, Sean was asked about the directional sound on the BD version, and he said:

That gives me the impression that the intent with the 5.1 track was to make something that is more in line with current 5.1 practices.

 

[Simon Howson]

Yes that is the impression I got, and that is what I heard in my quick skip between a few chapters.

I then played the same chapter starts with the 4.0 track, and the dialogue was moving around all over the place.

 

[Simon Howson]

DVDBeaver has Blu-ray captures up:
The Robe Blu-ray -Richard Burton Jean Simmons

 

[Simon Howson]

The Robe on Blu-ray is ranked 70th on Amazon.com and 9th on DVD Empire.

Pretty good going for a 56 year old film!

 

[David_B_K]

Simon, FWIW, I received the SD disc yesterday, and watched the first couple of scenes. I found the dialog in the 5.1 track to be quite directional, almost distractingly so. In the opening sequence, when Marcellus is walking through the slave market, you can hear one of the slave dealers hawking his merchandise. As the camera moves toward the left, his voice is in extreme left, then center, then right as the movement continues. Also, in the scene in Caligula's pavilion, I felt the need to crank up the volume as Marcellus was coming out very right of center and I could not hear him as well as I could hear Caligula because directional volume is not as loud as center volume.

Frankly, I wish the directional dialog had been confined to the 4.0 track. It probably worked on a huge curved screen when the distance from center to left or right of center could be measured by many feet. When that distance is only inches, it just sounds odd. I prefer the way a film today would do it, in which you only hear a voice from extreme left or right if the character is offscreen and you want to establish his location.

 

[Simon Howson]

I prefer it the old way! For some reason the 4.0 track is even more directional on my system. The Centre speaker sounds louder than the right and left. On the 4.0 track they all sound the same volum. It could be something I've done to my receiver set up?

 

[Brian McHale]

My complaint with the sound on the old DVD is that off-center characters would be visible, but their voices would seem to be offscreen. Is the new 4.0 track still like that? If so, I think I'd prefer the new 5.1 mix.