I recently got hold of the 1975 Tommy DVD - the soundtrack album with Elton, Ann-Margret, etc, not the original Who album.
It says it contains the original Quadrophonic mix locked in a 5.0 track. That's fair enough - it seems to play nice and is very, very discrete. There's four channels of sound, no LFE, and no center speaker - so no isolated vocals
However, I decided to give the tracks a rip for my FLAC collection, and upon opening them in Audacity, discovered something very strange - there IS an isolated vocal track running throughout the film, that seems to have spread across to the left and right speakers. Despite it apparently being the original Quadrophonic mix, there are actually 5 active channels of sound.
I added a blank track where the LFE track would usually be, bringing it to the regular 5.1 standard, and re-encoded the file. When I play it back, sure enough, the mix is different to when the DVD is played regularly. It's a vast improvement.
Clearly it was never supposed to be heard with 5 channels of sound, being advertised as the Quadrophonic mix, but I don't understand how digitally the DVD-encoders would have been able to 'lock out' the center channel for regular play. I'm very glad I ripped it though, otherwise I never would have discovered this. Very strange!
It says it contains the original Quadrophonic mix locked in a 5.0 track. That's fair enough - it seems to play nice and is very, very discrete. There's four channels of sound, no LFE, and no center speaker - so no isolated vocals
However, I decided to give the tracks a rip for my FLAC collection, and upon opening them in Audacity, discovered something very strange - there IS an isolated vocal track running throughout the film, that seems to have spread across to the left and right speakers. Despite it apparently being the original Quadrophonic mix, there are actually 5 active channels of sound.
I added a blank track where the LFE track would usually be, bringing it to the regular 5.1 standard, and re-encoded the file. When I play it back, sure enough, the mix is different to when the DVD is played regularly. It's a vast improvement.
Clearly it was never supposed to be heard with 5 channels of sound, being advertised as the Quadrophonic mix, but I don't understand how digitally the DVD-encoders would have been able to 'lock out' the center channel for regular play. I'm very glad I ripped it though, otherwise I never would have discovered this. Very strange!