Women In Love 4K UHD (1969) (BFI)

[nicwood]

Originally Posted by JohnCarpenterFan

[Show spoiler]I wouldn't assume so for a film of this age. There's much bigger films that came out after this one where original audio elements no longer even exist or are too far gone to use as any kind of source. Outside of AI, I'm not sure how a lot of those tracks could even be restored to the point where they'd have something resembling the entire frequency range.

There probably are cases where tracks are unnecessarily attenuated, but I feel the backlash against tracks which show any signs of rolloff or whatever (especially to the point where people won't buy the release) is a bit too much. I think it's like the "teal" conspiracy where there's two labs doing consistently problematic work but it results in every release perceived/accused to have "teal" getting treated with suspicion or outright disdain and sensationalist outrage even in the face of valid evidence supporting its look.

The high frequencies are usually first to go, so the SNR is reduced and the noise floor is made more noticeable as time passes. I see posts from people wanting this to all be captured and presented on home video but this would in no way be a purer audio experience. Well, it would be purer in the sense that an unrestored negative scan would be "purer" than the scan after it had been digitally restored with all dirt/damage removed, but who would want that over a beautifully restored presentation? I can't see much difference with audio; it's a degraded source and not representative of how it was originally. There's tools there to remedy/try and fix these issues and sometimes they are necessary in order to get something to sound close to how it did originally.

I know people took issue with the mono track for the UHD of The Searchers; unfortunately a composite mix was all that survived IIRC so only so much could be done, but I still feel the UHD sounds more authentic than the VHS some preferred. To me the VHS sounded harsh and artificial, and if I remember correctly the frequency range was highly suspect for a film of its era. This leads me to wonder what sort of "tinkering" is considered acceptable considering home video masters commonly sound noticeably different from the original optical tracks; is it fine to cook the audio but not noise reduce it?

I appreciate your response and definitely understand your arguments from a philosophical standpoint. I’m with you in not necessarily considering particularly harsh-sounding high frequencies pleasant to experience for the reasons you mentioned. On the other hand, if there’s global filtering / limiting across the entire track, it’s not helpful either similar to applying noise reduction to the images or performing heavy automatic clean-up that removes picture information. For example, Arrow and Bad Princess struck a good balance with "For a Few Dollars More" when they included two mono tracks on the disc - one with the highest of frequencies intact, the other one that carefully rolled them off without taking away other sonic information in the process. I actually chose the latter for my viewing experience and preferred its sound to the other mix. Unfortunately there’s often very little information available about audio remasterings in restoration notes other than "sourced from XYZ and pops, clicks etc. were removed". While it won’t convince every single (potential) buyer similar with the "teal" cases, with more information we could at least categorize what we have in front of us a bit easier without relying on too much guesswork.

I wish I knew what’s the case with Women in Love, so hopefully someone else more skilled at analyzing audio attempts a comparison between some of the other releases at some point.