Beauty and the Beast Diamond Edition audio remix is bad

[bis22]

I hope it's okay to start a new thread for this - I think it's important enough to deserve one.

I just watched the Blu-ray of Beauty and the Beast for the first time, and I must say, the video is spectacular. However, I'm extremely disappointed with the audio remix. For some reason, Disney has decided that the audio normally coming of the center channel should now come out of all three front channels, so all dialogue, singing, etc. that should be centered is coming out of all three front speakers at all times. This is not how a proper audio mix is done. It makes the audio sound much less natural and reduces much of the directionality. I checked the old Beauty and the Beast DVD, and the audio on that one is mixed properly with the center channel isolated from the other front channels.

This is the same thing that Disney pulled with the remix on the latest Little Mermaid DVD, so it seems this is something they will continue doing. It's very frustrating since the old releases sound much better, but the new ones look much better. Disney could have at least included the original mix as well, but didn't. When this was discovered with The Little Mermaid, I, among others, called Disney to complain about the new mix and the original mix not being available, but apparently they didn't get the message. I suggest anyone who cares about the audio quality of Disney's releases call them about this issue (1-800-723-4763). There's something wrong when the new release sounds worse than the old one.