Hmm let me disclose my motivation first: when I saw Gravion Zwei with 2.0 Jap track and 5.1 Eng track, I got pretty skeptical where the extra sound channels come from. It's safe to assume that GZ was not originally produced with 5.1 sound. So did ADV Films mastered/remastered the audio into 5.1? Not f-king likely. They probably just encoded the 2.0 audio (with their own Englsih dub) into 5.1. Something that my $179.99 receiver can do very well (I was pleasantly surprised to find that my cheapo receiver can seperate the BGM (backgroud music) and SFX (sound effects) out and space them around to the front and surround speakers and keep the dialogues to the front speakers only).
So just because the DVD box says Dolby 5.1 doesn't necessarily mean that you can hear the surround sound experience. Or it could be WORSE. I now remember watching an Eng dub anime (can't remember the title) which has horribly exaggerated surround audio. The English VA sounds like ghost voices that spoke from thin air, completely detached from the position of the character whose mouth is moving. Gosh I wish I could remember which one it was... Does anyone else notice that? (hmm it could be the English track on the Cowboy Bebop Remix???) Ok anyway back to Gundam. I clicked around on amazon.com and amazon.co.jp try and figure out the audio tracks on R1 and R2 releases. Amazingly almost everything on Amazon.co.jp are listed as "Dolby" but there's no information if it's Dolby 2.0 (South Park TV, Sex and the City TV) or Dolby 5.1 (Star Wars Ep.3). So that's completely useless. BTW, imdb lists the MSG movies as "mono", which sounds pretty believeable. Dolby only introduced Dolby Stereo in early 80s, http://www.dolby.com/about/who_we_are/history_4.html When was the Englsih version of MSG movies produced? I think it was in the VHS era right? So at best our friends at Westwood/Ocean only recorded a 2.0 stereo track for the dub, but did they "image" the SFX? And how come the R1 0079 movies (2002?) have 5.1 Jap track? Did Bandai/Sunrise actually went back to the original recordings and re-compose the sound elements for 5.1, like Frau is standing a little to the left and Amuro is in the cockpit in the middle, or the Dopp is flying right to left and approaching the viewer? BTW, according to: http://www.tvhandbook.com/History/History_timeline.htm The first stereo TV broadcast in the US was 1984, just 2 years before Zeta's first airing in Japan. Are we sure that Zeta was stereo originally? (not sure if Japan led or lagged the US in mid-80s) I was watching the R1 DVD on the weekend (rented it from Netflix) and I don't think I noticed any spatial quality to the audio, despite it being 2.0 supposingly. Of course the space combat scenes are perfect for that. I will listen for it more intently when the next disc arrives. Could it be that 0083, Z and MS Igloo are so far the only true 5.1 surround sound experience? Ok... that's my anal-retentive rant of the day. -- Dr. Core -------------------------------------------------- The Gundam Mailing List MK-II [email protected] Archives: http://www.gundam.com/gml Help: Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this in the BODY: help list
