This is a wonderful review. So in-depth and passionate, and you covered every aspect I was hoping to learn about. I have no choice but to become a subscriber!
Thanks for doing this. I could only find two of these on Amazon, and while the cheaper of the two was $115 before shipping, I watched "Light the Fuse..." on Prime and loved it, and to have all of these on BD, and with all the bonus features is worth it for me, especially after listening to your review.
Would you say these are a good introduction to someone who has never really watched Westerns? I'm drawn in by the fun yet campy B-movie vibe of these and they sound very entertaining.
Culturedog Gotta love some good old spaghetti westerns. Off topic but since i was getting into all the different audio formats, i had found out for myself that audio formats like Pro Logic and others were surround sound upmixers, which i found to be a really cool idea. I understand that Pro Logic is mainly a Dolby format, but is it possible that i could play the DTS 2.0 mono track on the Blu Ray of Jaws with Pro Logic? Just a tiny question. Mainly because i far prefer the original sound design. Glad to see you back doing another video and hope you are having a Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas to you too! Thanks for stopping by and checking out the video! Yeah, Pro Logic was/is a cool concept, and can be a handy way to divert LR mono mixes into the center channel. There are a lot of arguments over the best way to steer a mono film - between blasting the same signal to the L and R channels or using a dedicated center, and a lot of it relies on how close the speakers are spaced and whether or not the center speaker is beefy enough to do the job. I've got a really good phantom center image using L R, but I still like pumping all the sound into the center for mono flicks. It might depend on what receiver or a/v processor you're using, but most will allow you to activate Dolby Pro Logic (or one of its children: PLII, PLIIx, or PLIIz) to decode center/surround info from any 2.0 signal - even if it's carried in PCM, Dolby Digital or DTS. So in the case of Jaws, it should hit the receiver, light up the DTS decoder and automatically send the same mono signal to the L and R speakers. Then if you enable Pro Logic on top of that, it should start looking for out-of-phase material that it can send to the rear speakers (which it shouldn't find) and looking for identical signals in the L R channels that it can divert to the center channel. Jaws' mono track should then get steered mainly into the center channel, though there might be a small amount of signal going to the L/R channels still. Your receiver might have some other options as well - and there's a DTS competitor to Dolby Pro Logic II called DTS Neo:6 that's available on some units. The only caveat with these kind of processors is that they only work with 2.0, so you can't activate Pro Logic with a full 5.1 signal - which is a good thing, except... some lazy streaming services have been embedding 2.0 signals into a 5.1 feed, so when my wife watches an old episode of Murdoch Mysteries, my L and R towers get all the sound and my center and rears get active signals with nothing but silence. And since my receiver sees it as a full 5.1 signal, I can't activate Pro Logic and do proper surround steering. But that's another story... haha. But yeah, I find jamming older films' mono soundtracks on the center channel to be way more cinematic!
Culturedog Thank you for all the info. This kind of stuff is very fun to talk about, one of the main reasons for me of course is because i do fancy myself a little bit of a purist, sometimes i am never sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing because when you want to enjoy having your favorite movies on Blu Ray, many of them have different color grading or new sound effects added, with supposedly some movies adding it in very slightly in which sometimes you can't exactly tell and you got to switch between the mono and the 5.1 for three hours to tell all the differences, haha. What i'm trying to say is i love to watch movies in their original versions as close as possible. I am not the type that gets mad with 5.1 mixes on classic movies because if done right, i don't think it's revisionist at all in my personal opinion. However all movies that were released in Mono (even movies like Empire Strikes Back and Raiders which were Mono in some theaters) should always give you the Mono option in good quality. Can't wait for your next video, and don't forget the Christmas hat!
Love the spegetie westerns hey just picked up queen live at Wembley stadium from Japan brand new and the 1997 ac-3 version of we will rock you oh did you get the Japanese version of the Freddie Mercury tribute concert and picked up criterion edition of life of Brian thanks keep it spinning oh nearly forgot bought the CBS fox versions of the starwars trilogy for my cousin they were all sealed I just happened to look and the starwars was not the Mitsubishi it is the technidisc pressing definitely can tell the difference thanks Merry Christmas to you and your family
Still haven't gotten the Freddie tribute discs yet... but they're on the top of my Japanese laserdisc 'to get' list! Nice scores! Life of Brian is a classic. Nice going on the sealed Star Wars discs too - Technidisc even! Hope your cousin appreciates it! Merry Christmas!
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