Suddenly (?) old soundtracks sound better?

[garyrc]

When I was recently recuperating
from a health problem I ended up watching quite a few old movies on
television. Suddenly they have a more pleasantly bright, crisp high
end and less distortion. I'm not talking about films that were
sometimes released with a magnificent stereo magnetic soundtrack from
the 1950s on and have survived the conversion to digital formats, but
films that would generally have been released in mono optical. Back in the
day, these films would sound fairly awfull; they would have
muffled overtones (through either the pretty good Altec or JBL theater
systems, or through the TV of my late childhood and teen years that had a
JBL 075 on top). Is it likely that:

• They have gone back to the original film sound elements
  (which were often magnetic, but usually released in degraded form on
  optical), even on the "B" pictures that are often on the THIS network.
• There
  is some routine digital restoration process that is cheap and easy that
  can squeeze fairly high quality out of old optical tracks -- cheap
  enough -- and easy enough -- so that whoever supplies THIS with
  films would have run their old films through it. Most of the films on
  THIS are introduced by the MGM lion, so I think they own a library of
  films made by them and several other studios. Our bedroom TV plays through a small home brew stereo system, with T-35s (aka K -77s) on top.

[JJkizak]

I do recall that all of the 16mm optical sound tracks were cut off at 6KHZ and it sounded more like 4KHZ in the field. I was never impressed with optical track performance as the low end was never worth a dam either.

JJK

[russ69]

I'm not sure what movies or source you are talking about but many, many older films have been fully or partially restored. That would include the sound tracks. It's fairly easy to clean up the old audio tracks if you are not worried about losing some content that is mixed in with the noise. You should see the Technicolor restoration of "The Wizard of OZ", it's absolutely breathtaking. The three primary color film reels were digitally copied, aligned, then restored. The result is probably better than any movie theater showing ever was. (Technicolor is shot with 3 cameras, each one shooting in a separate filtered color system).

[garyrc]

You should see the Technicolor restoration of "The Wizard of OZ", it's absolutely breathtaking.

RE: OZ ... did it sound like they were able to provide crisp speaking voices and overtones above about 6K?

I have heard both pretty good and pretty bad soundtracks of Casablanca, the good ones were crisp, but not as crisp as what I recently experienced with old movies on the tube. The better Casablancas also had more bass ... all on the same system.

Some old Disney optical tracks were pretty good (better than most) but not really very crisp. That being said, the recent restoration of the 6 channel magnetic soundtrack of Sleeping Beauty seemed to be devoid of bass and limited in dynamics, compared to the 70 mm version. The color was terrific, though, and they should be commended on that ... but even it did not have the dark beauty and saturation that the 70 mm original (Conornet, S.F.) and the 70 mm re-realese (Alexandria, S.F) had.

I have very high hopes for Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur on Blu-ray this spring.

One of the old movies that now sounds crisp and used to sound dull* is The Fugitive Kind, with Brando. But even old TV shows they run on THIS for insomniacs sound like they now have high frequencies, like Sea Hunt or The Outer Limits. I can't see someone spending time and money on soundtracks from the old TV days, so I think they may be running them through some kind of processor at THIS... I may write them.

* The last time I saw The Fugitive Kind (previous to this time) it was played through a JBL 075 tweeter -- one of the brightest ever -- but it sounded dull at the time.

[Guest " "]

yes....know the feeling well....you now can feel the words to songs where once you just heard instruments. Symptoms of the cupids arrow.