Hi all
To answer rusinurbe's questions first. Endless River? Never heard of it. If such a thing were to exist I'd imagine there would be a 5.1, but I can't possibly talk about it.
As for release schedules or otherwise, not in my control. I've seen the general dislike of having to buy the boxset to get the BD, and mentioned it to the band's management. It is they and the record co (now Warners) who determine these things. Whether this will make any difference, who knows.
One other thing I'd like to clarify, as it has come up a few times in the Div Bell thread. The Division Bell album was recorded on analogue tape, specifically two 24 track analogue machines linked (classic 48 track).
There has been mention of someone speaking to Guy who said it was hybrid. That was Momentary Lapse of Reason, which was a Mitsubishi open reel 32 track machine (48k 16 bit) and analogue tape for drums. Remember, Guy's a bass player, and therefore more a 'missing link' than an authority on anything (not true, he's a great friend and a clever chap)
The original stereo mix was also to analogue tape, and the current re-issues of the stereo are from that analogue.
When we did that mix, there were some midi elements running live on the mix. I later went back in & recorded those elements onto the multitracks. On one song, Keep Talking, I had to go to a 3rd 24 track tape to get all the elements printed (because of Gary Wallis's drum machine loops).
The orchestra (High Hopes & Great Day for Freedom) had been recorded on a separate multitrack (in multitrack form) and sub-mixed to stereo onto the master multitracks (pretty normal procedure).
On doing the surround I went back & made new orchestra sub-mixes in surround from the original orchestra tapes. This and the 3rd multitrack on Keep Talking meant that I had no choice but to transfer those elements to Pro Tools (digital workstation) in order to be able to run everything at once. So strictly speaking there are a few digital elements on the surround mix that were not digitised on the original stereo. Other wise I worked entirely from the analogue tapes.
The 5.1 mix was printed to a Sadie digital workstation (which is the system most commonly used for mastering). The 96k on the BD is those sadie files (with a recent mastering pass), the 48k used for the DVD is a transfer (analogue domain) from those. DTS & dolby encoding was done by the authoring house, but that's not really anything that there are any subjective judgements on (well these days, going back a bit it was a real time 'hardware' process & there were things you could tweak, now it's 'drag & drop' software).
The inclusion of DTS on the DVD is because this one is my call. James (Guthrie) hates the sound of DTS & won't put it on the discs he has control of. I have a few reservations about it, but take the attitude that it's you guy's choice what you listen to, & if you don't like the DTS you'll listen to the Dolby dig.
OK, that's it for now. I'll come back later for any further questions, and maybe another ramble about the way of thinking about things in 5.1 mixing, and how different mixers take different approaches (very gratifying that you seem to like the way I approach things)
andy J