Blu Raspberry - Warner to Put Lossy Audio on New Line Releases As Well!
Posted in Commentary, Studios on July 11th, 2008 by Dave
I must admit I was a little excited when I read that New Line is going to release Blow on Blu-ray Disc on the increasingly busy release date of September 23rd.
My excitement was a little short lived when I discovered that Warner appears to have taken over the New Line catalogue for real - and have infected New Line with their Dolby Digital sound tracks.
I really can’t believe this. After New Line has set a new standard for audio on their releases with lossless 7.1 sound mixes, Warner comes along with a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix for Blow. I am extremely underwhelmed by this news.
With Universal using DTS-MA on all of their Blu-ray releases and Paramount pretty much shifting to Dolby True HD, this leaves Warner as the only major studio that appears to believe that 640 kbps Dolby Digital is acceptable for Blu-ray Disc.
So Warner earns the Blu Raspberry for this week. What do you think about lossy audio on Blu-ray releases? Feel free to comment.
July 11th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Seems to me that Warner is omitting lossless just to encourage a future double-dip. So on titles where Warner gives us a lossy 640 kbps mix, I refuse to buy…the exception to this are older catalog titles like The Road Warrior, which will likely never benefit from lossless.
This news is very disappointing, as just about every New Line title has been superb from an audio perspective. So this is a huge loss.
July 11th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
I suppose Warner is attempting to save money by also using the lossy tracks created for DVDs on some of their Blu-rays, but if they want those of us who bought the DVDs to trade up, or to give the average consumer a reason to switch to Blu-ray they better consider re-doing the soundtracks for all films they release in HiDef. What’s the point of releasing an HD version of a film if the audio doesn’t measure up to the media on which it’s being released?!
July 11th, 2008 at 11:52 pm
@ Tim - I agree - New Line was ‘doing it right’ and now they seem to be ‘just another Warner studio’
@ Glen - to be fair the 640 kbps is a hair more bitrate than the DVDs at 448 kbps. Hardly ‘HD’ though - it is not like Blu-ray can’t support lossless codecs - and at Warner video rates, PCM could easily be used with bitrate to spare.
I suspect this disc will be a single layer, lossless might have pushed them to DL?
July 13th, 2008 at 10:11 am
That has me pretty upset I must say… Dolby Digital 5.1 vs DTS-HD 5.1 MA is a “no brainer”