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A Few Words About A few words about...™ Jaws -- in Blu-ray (1 Viewer)

rich_d

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Jonathan Perregaux said:
I eventually drove literally 50 miles out of my way to secure a copy of the Best Buy Digibook edition. My local area (Southwest Connecticut and parts of New York) had virtually no copies up until Friday.
Sorry to hear that. Best Buy just needs to adopt a strategy. If they don't think a loss-leader is a good strategy for a specific title - don't do them. If they do think it's effective do it right so you don't disappoint customers. I mean the whole idea of the loss-leader is to get the customer in the store so they will pick up higher margin items or at least get them thinking about such a purchase. That would all seem to go 'bye-bye' if they don't have the thing the customer came into the store for in the first place.
 

Dr Griffin

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Never The Best Buy doesn't care about disappointing customers. Never The Best Buy orders so many copies and sells them. That's all they care about. When the first batch dwindles they get more and sell them until they're gone and so on. Or something very like that.
 

Todd J Moore

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Actually, I had a surprisingly positive experience tonight at my local Best Buy. I checked to see if JAWS was in stock before driving up there. The website said so. When I got there, there was not one copy on the shelf. I hunted down an employee who they checked in the back to see if there were copies back then (which there was). I was happy enough to pick up a copy of CE3K, too.
 

Oblivion138

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TravisR said:
I was going to check out a few scenes in 7.1 but ended up watching the entire movie again with the 7.1 track. To my ears, the noticable changes were the gun shots, harpoon sound effects, some of the water splashing (when people were in the water on the 4th of July or when Charlie and Denherder toss the meat out into the ocean from the dock) and, like you said, the explosion at the end. I'm so familiar with the movie that the changes stick out to me so I'll always listen to the mono track but I'm sure most viewers will be very happy with the 7.1.
I agree that most will be quite pleased with the 7.1 track. It's crystal clear and nicely immersive. It just doesn't sound like Jaws to me...and that's down to my familiarity with the film, I'm sure. I can't watch Psycho with the 5.1 remix for the same reason. And my ears even set off alarm bells over the ONE replaced sound effect in Taxi Driver's 5.1 mix. Some films, I know like the back of my hand, and when something is changed, there's just no getting around it.
 

Steven_M Grimes

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I agree that most will be quite pleased with the 7.1 track. It's crystal clear and nicely immersive. It just doesn't sound like Jaws to me...
I also am very familiar with the mono track, but found myself getting into the movie in a new way when I watched it with the 7.1 track. I still miss the things mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and am glad the mono track is on the Blu-ray, but I was fine with the new surround mix. And I totally did not expect to be.
 

Greg_D_R

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Steven_M Grimes said:
I also am very familiar with the mono track, but found myself getting into the movie in a new way when I watched it with the 7.1 track. I still miss the things mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and am glad the mono track is on the Blu-ray, but I was fine with the new surround mix. And I totally did not expect to be.
Same here, in that I had seen the comparison on the blog posted earlier, and I was expecting to be let down, especially when the shark breaks into the cabin, but by that point I was so into the movie, I didn't notice.
 

Douglas Monce

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I finally got my copy of Jaws, and I have some purely personal observations about the changes to the sound. The first thing that jumped out at me, was that the original explosion sound effect, was one of the aforementioned "Universal" explosions, that were used to death in Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and almost every other Universal production from the late 70's through the mid 80s. I believe this sound was created for Tora, Tora, Tora. To me it sounds very much like a chemical explosion, where the new sound, sounds more like a high pressure tank rupturing. The gun shots, while new, don't sound radically different to the original. It sounded very much like they were trying to find a more modern recording, that was a close cousin to the original. I did notice that the same ricochet effect was used for the bullet striking the tank. All and all not as distracting as I was thinking it would be. A very listenable track, and the original mono is always there if I want it.
I must say I'm very happy with this release. Nicely done Universal. Keep up the good work on future releases!
Doug
 

EdReedFan20

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Universal is awesome! I went to get my Digital Copy of Jaws (Ultraviolet (through Vudu) and digital copy (through iTunes) and not only do I get the SD version, but the HD version as well! Fantastic work Universal!
 

jimvac

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For those who are wondering, the Academy Award Winning mono track on this release is excellent. Plenty of range, not the least bit tinny or lacking in depth, and it delivers John Williams' soundtrack very effectively. I'm glad Universal included it for those of us who prefer such things.
 

Oblivion138

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Absolutely agreed, jimvac. The mono track is excellent, and gave me a much better viewing experience than the 7.1 mix. The 7.1 sounds fine for what it is - just as the 5.1 mix for Psycho did - but I just can't get past the re-recorded FX. Probably only old fogies and purists like me will prefer the mono track, but it's great that Universal included it.
 

Cineman

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Sam Posten said:

Thanks for that link. I love that kind of shot by shot breakdown in great films. One other Hitchcock-related aspect of the sequence is that the long underwater pre-attack shot from the shark's POV produces one of the most anxiety inducing elements of the scene, imo. Like the pre-attack shot in Hitchcock's Dial 'M' for Murder, where Hitch's camera shifts around to the back of Grace Kelly and we see her from Lesgate/Swann's POV, including a glimpse of his hands rising with the garrote from the bottom of the cinema frame (as though they are our hands!) and the aerial shot of the gas station location from the POV of the birds in flight in The Birds, it is as though WE are as responsible as any of the principle characters, if not more so, for the pending attack.


Hitchcock and Spielberg were masters at understanding the mindset of the movie-goer, why we go to the movies in the first place, and how to exploit that mindset to maximum effect. After all, we came to the theater that night to see horrible things happen to people, didn't we? Wouldn't we be disappointed if nothing particularly terrible happened to anyone in these kinds of movies? lol. Hitch and Spielberg did not give us a pass for our contribution to whatever horrible things occur up there on that cinema screen. And in that way we also derive a special kind of movie-going pleasure in effectively sharing the mindset of the director/filmmaker, along with the credit or blame, for what they have produced...at our request.
 
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For those who are wondering, the Academy Award Winning mono track on this release is excellent. Plenty of range, not the least bit tinny or lacking in depth, and it delivers John Williams' soundtrack very effectively. I'm glad Universal included it for those of us who prefer such things.

Sorry to bump this thread but anyways I personally prefer the mono track that was on the 2005 DVD. It was a tad crisper and didn’t have a few of the flaws the current mono has. For example when the engine overheats and explodes the sound of the explosion on the current mono is in the wrong pitch. When Hooper cuts open the shark the sound effects in the scene are slightly out of sync. For more details check out this video I did about two years ago.



Also I don’t think this is news to a lot of people here but incase there’s newcomers or people have been misinformed, the 7.1 mix is NOT based off the original mono as some reviews and press releases have implied. It’s simply an expansion of the remix done in 2000 for the first DVD release. Only about two or three sounds from the mono were restored to the new mix one of which is the ricochet when the bullet hits the air tank.

Original Mono



2000 Surround Remix



2012 Surround Remix



Note how the last two sound more or less the same throughout??
 

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