House M.D. - Complete Collection Pre-order

[McCrutchy]

Originally Posted by Buzz201

Whilst I think Amazon will accept your return, that's not necessarily because they agree it's lying, that's not neccesarily because they agree it's lying, it's because they're a huge business, and they'd probably accept your return regardless of what you put...

And I certainly could not return Braquo to Amazon, I purchased it from Zavvi...

Amazon, Zavvi, it matters not. A return for a refund would (or should) be accepted.

And just to clear, this doesn't really have anything to do with lying. It's entirely likely that nobody lied intentionally. Although the effect is that the packaging "lies" by mis-representing the contents inside, as I pointed out, the logo was probably attached out of ignorance, not deliberate deception. Amazon, or any other reputable vendor, would accept the return because the packaging mis-represents the contents inside, no more, no less.

In the case of this House M.D. set, I have nothing to return, as I cancelled my order when I saw the lossy audio on the Spanish version, knowing the UK discs would be the same.

(The above response should have been here from the beginning. I don't know what happened with my posting of it...)

Originally Posted by jordanwalkert

Honestly, it shouldn't matter a ton. Even with DTS 5.1, that's still better quality than you've ever experienced the show's early seasons. It's better than broadcast Dolby 5.1, it's better than previous DVD versions, and a show like this is mostly talking and minor atmospheric sounds. I highly doubt there would be a huge jump in quality to DTS-MA. Besides, the 1080p video of a show shot, color graded and mastered entirely from 35mm film is what makes this worth it. House has always looked and sounded incredible, so this will be a huge upgrade regardless. Because who knows when or if we will ever get a release in the US- and even if we do, that might not include lossless either!

Not to single out jordanwalkert, but honestly, posts like this need to stop, about how [insert Blu-ray release] doesn't "need" lossless audio for any variety of reasons. One of the biggest errors the BDA ever made was in allowing lossy audio onto the format, because distributors are often lazy and careless, and lossy audio is often just an easy way for them to cut corners on many releases, like this one.

In the case of this set, you have DTS audio for one reason only--it reduces the number of discs in the set, and saves a small amount of time and costs for Universal.

Shockingly, since they decided to put all (or at least most) of the extras and commentaries on this set, of course they were probably never going to be able to provide lossless audio on sets that were only five discs per season (the shorter fourth season has four discs), considering that they just had to jam DTS 5.1 dubbed audio in French German and Japanese, and DTS 2.0 dubbed audio in Portuguese and Spanish on these discs as well.

Notice how the US season sets have only the one audio track in lossless, and my understanding is that some of the European season sets even had lossless dubbed audio to go along with the lossless original, but because Universal wanted to release the exact same set in several territories, and likely wanted to keep the set at 40 BDs or less, you get this fiasco. Any US complete series set (should one materialize) is far more likely to have lossless audio.

The complete series DVD boxes from Universal in Europe contained 48 DVDs, and again, the DVD versions were usually more localized, with less audio and subtitles options.