"2001: a Space Odyssey" Laserdisc Criterion Box set-GREAT SURROUND

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kap'n krunch

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Yes, the one supervised by Kubrick himself.
Hadn't noticed that it was "Dolby Surround".

I have 2 DVD versions of it and this one on LD-which is my favorite one.
Bought it 2nd hand and it has some video noise "speckles" throughout.

What I hadn't been aware of is that , since I have to watch it when my other half is asleep or out, I had never cranked it enough(until today) to notice that IT ROCKS in SURROUND!!!

Granted , the sound source is not the best cause there is distortion in the mids (either that or my system has gone to the canines),
but the rears are VERY active and quite discrete. A LOT of LF info too!!!

Examples of rear channel goodness; The wild animals during the "Dawn of Man" when they are huddle at night in the cave, Hal's voice in some scenes, and even during "Atmospheres" some voices are distinctly in the rears.

Anybody here have this and can confirm it?
(or is it the meds that taking over?)

Cheers!
:smokin
 
Yes, the one supervised by Kubrick himself.
Hadn't noticed that it was "Dolby Surround".

I have 2 DVD versions of it and this one on LD-which is my favorite one.
Bought it 2nd hand and it has some video noise "speckles" throughout.

What I hadn't been aware of is that , since I have to watch it when my other half is asleep or out, I had never cranked it enough(until today) to notice that IT ROCKS in SURROUND!!!

Granted , the sound source is not the best cause there is distortion in the mids (either that or my system has gone to the canines),
but the rears are VERY active and quite discrete. A LOT of LF info too!!!

Examples of rear channel goodness; The wild animals during the "Dawn of Man" when they are huddle at night in the cave, Hal's voice in some scenes, and even during "Atmospheres" some voices are distinctly in the rears.

Anybody here have this and can confirm it?
(or is it the meds that taking over?)

Cheers!
:smokin

I bought the set when it was originally released. Much of the rear channel action you are hearing is simply the matrix systems inability to keep sounds where they belong. The original, non-animorphic DVD of 2001 has the original, un-modified 6-track mix, and the vast majority of those sounds are not in the surrounds. The voices on "Atmospheres" are in the surrounds though as is HAL's voice a lot of the time. The Criterion 2001 video transfer also has a completely incorrect aspect ratio of about 1.9:1. There is some distortion in the mag master they used and the bass isn't as deep as the later transfers. The Blu-ray and animorphic DVD have totally screwed up soundtracks, with all the directional dialog and many of the sound effects re-directed to the center channel and some effects moved to the surrounds (i.e. fake surrounds).
 
I bought the set when it was originally released. Much of the rear channel action you are hearing is simply the matrix systems inability to keep sounds where they belong. The original, non-animorphic DVD of 2001 has the original, un-modified 6-track mix, and the vast majority of those sounds are not in the surrounds. The voices on "Atmospheres" are in the surrounds though as is HAL's voice a lot of the time. The Criterion 2001 video transfer also has a completely incorrect aspect ratio of about 1.9:1. There is some distortion in the mag master they used and the bass isn't as deep as the later transfers. The Blu-ray and animorphic DVD have totally screwed up soundtracks, with all the directional dialog and many of the sound effects re-directed to the center channel and some effects moved to the surrounds (i.e. fake surrounds).

Sooo, it's the meds :)

The original NON anamorphic DVD?
Dang, I think I have the first WB transfer to DVD -from 2001 (the ones with the cardboard box and plastic edges), but that's anamorphic AFAIK-i also have the next version on DVD..
Thanks for the info though..AGAIN!

BTW, love your signature avatar....I guess you arae aware of the
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/
website.
Martin ,the curator is a GREAT guy!!!
 
Sooo, it's the meds :)

The original NON anamorphic DVD?
Dang, I think I have the first WB transfer to DVD -from 2001 (the ones with the cardboard box and plastic edges), but that's anamorphic AFAIK-i also have the next version on DVD..
Thanks for the info though..AGAIN!

BTW, love your signature avatar....I guess you arae aware of the
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/
website.
Martin ,the curator is a GREAT guy!!!

The non-animorphic DVD version of 2001 was issued by MGM in a plastic keep case with a trivia booklet - I don't think WB reissued it when they got the rights. The MGM DVD release was mastered to D1 from the 65mm negative but isn't all that great looking (it was done for their CAV LD release in the early 90's), but the sound is fantastic and fully directional with nothing 'moved' or mono-ed. When I watch the Blu-ray of 2001 I sync the original DVD to it for the sound since I can't stand the remix destruction done to the soundtrack.

Thanks for the compliment on my sig avatar - it's a scan from the third issue of The Perfect Vision in their article about pan/scan. I love the Widescreen Museum site - Martin has sent me many great scans and stuff over the years.
 
I don't remember the aspect ratio being wrong on the CLV version. Did they correct it by then?
 
I never saw the Criterion CLV version of 2001 so I don't know if it was corrected or not. On the CAV, it's nowhere near correct - and it varies - it's more squeezed during the opening credits than it is during the film itself - and you can see in some shots that HAL's eye is oval shaped. It's 2.16:1 not centered the same as the later transfers and shows less information than the later transfers - it's not the proper 2.20:1 of the Super Panavision negative nor the 2.35:1 of Kubrick's 35mm 'Scope reduction print that was used for the CAV transfer. The DVD's and Blu-ray are correct.
 
I bought the set when it was originally released. Much of the rear channel action you are hearing is simply the matrix systems inability to keep sounds where they belong. The original, non-animorphic DVD of 2001 has the original, un-modified 6-track mix, and the vast majority of those sounds are not in the surrounds. The voices on "Atmospheres" are in the surrounds though as is HAL's voice a lot of the time. The Criterion 2001 video transfer also has a completely incorrect aspect ratio of about 1.9:1. There is some distortion in the mag master they used and the bass isn't as deep as the later transfers. The Blu-ray and animorphic DVD have totally screwed up soundtracks, with all the directional dialog and many of the sound effects re-directed to the center channel and some effects moved to the surrounds (i.e. fake surrounds).

Just to set things straight;I was decoding it with my receiver's DPL II Movie mode-hope it was the right one...
 
Just to set things straight;I was decoding it with my receiver's DPL II Movie mode-hope it was the right one...

Standard Pro-Logic with the mono surround channel would give more accurate results because it was encoded in Dolby MP Matrix which only has a single surround channel. DPL-II will give stereo surrounds that are not contained in a standard Dolby MP Matrix mix of the time. The effect can be nice and fun, but it's not accurate to the original encoding.
 
My 3M pressed CAV Blade Runner always looked good, well past 3M warnings. Need to pull it out and see if that's still true. Been 5 years or so...
 
My 3M pressed 2001 is still fine, thankfully. 3M, at one time, was the best of the best when it came to making LD's - then something happened and not only did their discs start to suffer from rot but 'out-of-the-box-defects' went sky high to the point where they were no better than Pioneer America's Carson plant before Pioneer replaced all of the old MCA DiscoVision mastering and pressing equipment. 3M's biggest problem - and one they always had - was that they couldn't make a CAA Extended Play disc so their CLV Extended Play pressings often had horrible crosstalk on many LD players - I often wouldn't buy a CLV title pressed by 3M because of their crosstalk problems. 3M didn't want to pay Pioneer Video the licensing fees for CAA Extended Play mastering - Pioneer and DiscoVision jointly developed the CAA Extended Play process and shared the patent royalties. Also, 3M's filtering of the audio/video carriers before pulse-width-modulating the mastering laser was such that they couldn't accommodate video with simultaneous high color saturation and high audio levels without interference of the chroma into the FM audio carriers, so the color level was backed off on the master resulting in many of their titles having quite a pastel color look. (a few of their initial PCM digital audio titles also had noise in the darker portions of the video, again due to interference between the two, until 3M improved their filtering)

The LaserDisc format really improved when Kuraray disc manufacturing adopted the Faroudja Super NTSC encoder for mastering LD's - after that their LD's had a full 2 MHz of chroma bandwidth as well as dramatically reduced chroma/luma crosstalk artifacts due to the pre-filtering the Super NTSC encoder applied to the signal. Played on a decent LD player with a good 3D comb filter a Kuraray disc could look like a true component source and not color-bandwidth limited composite NTSC.
 
The only difference between CAA and CLV is instead of being a CONSTANT linear or angular velocity this created a hybrid between CLV and CAV. On CAA, a recording is CAV for a specified number of turns - then the speed steps down and it's CAV for another specified number of turns and so on and so on.
 
The only difference between CAA and CLV is instead of being a CONSTANT linear or angular velocity this created a hybrid between CLV and CAV. On CAA, a recording is CAV for a specified number of turns - then the speed steps down and it's CAV for another specified number of turns and so on and so on.

And it greatly reduces crosstalk on Extended Play discs. 3M claimed they never needed the format but their CLV discs performance showed that not to be the case.
 
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