Macca watches A Hard Days Night for the first time in 40 Years

I have so many versions of AHDN:
MPI VHS, Criterion CLV LD, Voyager CD-ROM, MPI DVD, Miramax DVD.
I also have a cassette tape of the soundtrack from a TV broadcast in the 70s. I have that version of the soundtrack etched in my brain. My conclusion is that the Miramax is closest to that broadcast than any of the others that preceded it.

 

I can only play my Miramax DVD in stereo or mono. In my experience the music is softer than you'd expect compared to the dialogue. I switched polarity to be sure and it was softer both ways.

Are just the songs mixed for 5.1 or is the entire soundtrack mixed for 5.1? The dialogue sounds ok in stereo.

 

I tried reversing the analog R and L outputs and I thought the
whole thing cleaned up nicely.

I A/Bed it about 20 times in different parts of the movie and
I'm fairly certain that the R and L channels must have been accidently
reversed when the laserdisc was created. I've heard this sort
of distortion before occasionally when watching a movie or
something on television.

With the R and L connected "correctly", I got a fair amount of
echo and all of the processing modes seemed to make it worse.

When I reversed the R and the L the echo went away and the processing
modes seemed to work correctly. The dialogue came out of the
center speaker - and it sounded flat - without reverb... and the
dialogue stayed locked in the center speaker (adjusting the R or L
balance had no effect on the sound).

To my surprise, during the music portions of the disc - I got a
pretty nice 3 speaker ( R + C + L ) soundfield. Probably the
way I was supposed to hear it !

My copy is the CAV (black) double disc gatefold set. I think the
date on it is 1987. I'm not sure there was a lot of home theater
gear that could have decoded "dolby stereo" at that time. Although
I'm certain some people had some gear that could...


To be fair, I still think there are problems with the "dolby stereo"
mix for the film... and these problems are fairly well documented.

But if the DVD had the following:

1.) original mono (Dolby 1.0)
2.) Dolby stereo (linear PCM) (same as the LD but polarity corrected)

I think we'd have a pretty good set of options.

But it was nice to feel that I was hearing the thing as I would have
heard it in a properly set up theater in the 80s.