www.madmaxmovies.com

About the new 4K BD:

Someone detected a "distorsion" in the credits, when the music starts or some seconds before it.
The distortion in the credits could either by the result of the volume being cranked up too high in that part during the initial mixing process.

Also, a guy claimed that the Australian audio mono track sounds "hissy", I think it is supposed to sound this way since 1979.


Any clue?

Anyone?

From Blu-Ray.com Forum:

"the distortion is progressive during the movie and becomes perceptible (to me) after the hour mark when Max's wife leaves the beach

it's over loud music and engines from that point and gets progressively worse until the end credits where it is most noticeable

it's also on the previous blu ray / dvd combo release so isn't an error by Kino

I am guessing it occurred when the mono aus track was stereofied by Chase Audio.. either a digital problem with linear software they were using (pro tools?) or a result of higher degradation of the source material (tapes) as the movie gets toward the end. Difficult to say which to be honest..

If I have time I can isolate the noise and provide a link to it so people can easily hear it. Once you notice it, it is impossible to ignore, but to most people it would not be intrusive.. I think your brain needs to be wired to that particular frequency band

It's not the end of the world but it is room for possible future improvement, so that's a positive"


And then:

(SAMPLE)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xo0e1nn6ktwqw ... X.zip?dl=0

Since I'm an audio engineer I think I can suspect what happened here.

It's true that the previous blu ray/dvd releases of Mad Max have this same kind of digital artifacts.
With the 4k Blu Ray they tend to be cranked up because the tendency is to make higher frequencies louder for 'clarity' these days.

So, the noise is there, but where did it come from?
I think it came from one of the earliest official 'digital' audio transfers of the movie. And it's still being used till this day. If that's the case, especially if new releases are advertised as brand new 'audio visual analog to digital transfers' then fuck those people who advertise them like that, because it's clear that the previous bluray/dvd releases have the same type of noise, only muffled a little because audio trends were a little bit more conservative back then.

BUT, if the original audio of MM1 indeed includes all those digital artifacts, I can only guess that it might have been the fault of the film being the first mixed to timecode which might have involved some very primitive digital audio conversion. But I'm only guessing here, I don't know what equipment they used when they were mixing to timecode back in what.. 1978? If they used any digital stuff at all!

Having said that, I think they just simply botched the audio transfer way back when and they're re-using that same audio for whatever reason and the cracks are starting to show now.

Sounds extremely correct. I agree, word by word.

Thank you so much, Taipan.

Come to think of it, the increase in loudness of digital artifacts as the movie progresses makes me think that maybe they used some kind of early noise reduction technology for the first digital transfer. Assuming that the tape degrades as it goes along (potentially, the most worn out parts are at the beginning because they're played and handled the most) there could've been more hiss and noise that the de-noiser had to deal with and it produced audible artifacts near the end of the film.

Those are of course just my guesses, I can't exactly tell why that happened but those noise reduction artifacts sound really similar to modern day noise reduction software cranked up to 11, I've heard that stuff before.

Taipan wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 3:19 pm Come to think of it, the increase in loudness of digital artifacts as the movie progresses makes me think that maybe they used some kind of early noise reduction technology for the first digital transfer. Assuming that the tape degrades as it goes along (potentially, the most worn out parts are at the beginning because they're played and handled the most) there could've been more hiss and noise that the de-noiser had to deal with and it produced audible artifacts near the end of the film.

One thing is for sure, it is inherent to the way the audio track has been produced back in 1978. Nobody's fault.

Have you tried to check the original Australian VHS tape for this? I guess the noises are on there, as well as the audio distortion before the end credits. Sadly, it's part of the original audio track, there's nothing we can do.

No I haven't. Because there's no way of knowing if there'd be any inherent digital audio artifacts on a format like that. Most of it is masked and showed its ugly head with digital transfers.

Taipan wrote: ↑Fri Mar 26, 2021 3:27 pm No I haven't. Because there's no way of knowing if there'd be any inherent digital audio on a format like that. Most of it is masked and showed its ugly head with digital transfers.

Yes, I understand it.

Well, at least, now I'm sure that I've always heard that when watching the movie, so it's a "natural" part of it and not an error of the various digital transfers.

Did anyone check the original Europe DVD alternate mix to see if it was there?

I suppose not as the mix is different.