Timecop Revisited

[Robert George]

Back in April, I made two mistakes that I almost never make. First, I accepted a graph of a small piece of a soundtrack posted by someone without any background on how it was done or what the poster's qualification to do such a thing accurately. Second, I listened to the forum chatter about a disc that almost none of the posters actually had.

Lesson learned.

I just spent more time and effort than this subject warrants to do a side-by-side "ear" comparison of three different 5.1 soundtracks for Timecop. The three versions are Shout Factory's 4K disc (DTS-HD MA), a Warner Blu-ray (DTS), and the new Studio Canal disc from Germany (DTS-HD MA).

For this test, I created an MKV file with the 5.1 tracks from each of these discs as well as the 2.0 track from the Shout disc. All post processing in the Denon receiver was disabled. Listening was done from two locations, the center viewing seat and about one foot from the left surround speaker. Switching tracks was very quick, almost seamless. More than a dozen scenes were compared, often multiple times. Volume was above my normal listening level.



Conclusions...the Shout disc is neither defective or lacking in any way. Indeed, the surrounds are more active than the Warner track and even a small amount more than the Studio Canal track in some scenes. Low frequency response sounds the same, or nearly so, across the three tracks.

At least one poster has complained the Shout track is not a discrete 5.1 track with dialog leakage in the surrounds. I did not find that in any of the scenes I compared. The only dialog I could detect in the surrounds was in a couple of scenes where there is an echo, as in a large space, and then only the echo effect.

Final thought...if you own the Shout disc, don't worry, be happy. If you have decided to not purchase the Shout disc for any of the negative comments here, you probably weren't going to buy it anyway. To each his own.