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Yeah, I saw that on AVS almost as soon as I posted the entry. Looks like I'll be picking up a copy of the UK version, then. To be brutally honest, I'm going to state the rather unpopular opinion that lossless audio is overrated and that a lot of the time there is zero audible difference between it and a lossy track. A decent sound system is vastly more important.

(Posted on Monday, August 3, 2009 at 2:35 PM)

Daniel:

"Maybe you're not as picky about sound as you are about visuals, but I for one think that lossless tracks (when mastered properly) are just as beneficial to film viewing as HD video."

Maybe so, maybe so, and as a matter of principle I do feel that every BD release should have a lossless audio track if the appropriate master is available, simply so that the best possible version is being presented, whether or not any changes are detectable by the human ear. It's simply that, in my experience, more often than not I hear no improvement between a lossy and a lossless track. There are exceptions, of course - for example Constantine's TrueHD track - but more often than not the only difference, if any, tends to be that the lossless track is encoded at a slightly higher volume (the Bourne trilogy being a prime example of this).

I wish I could find a link to it, but I remember a test that was carried out by a professional audio engineer comparing the waveforms of lossy and lossless mixes of the same film, and no differences were actually visible on the resulting read-outs. The engineer concluded that, while there was an appreciable difference between a 448 Kbps encode and a 640 Kbps version, the difference between a 640 Kbps and a 1.5 Mbps encode was minimal in terms of data loss, and that the difference between a 1.5 Mbps track and a lossless one was essentially non-existent. I'm just quoting from memory and could very well be getting this entirely wrong, but it certainly tallies with my own experiences.

I haven't watched Blade Runner in some time. I'll have to dig it out again and take a gander at the two audio tracks.

PS. Out of curiosity, in the examples you mention, do you know whether the lossy and lossless tracks are derived from the same or different masters? I know that, in the case of some music titles, the lossless tracks can be derived from completely different mixes created specifically for high definition home viewing, so it stands to reason that they would sound different to their lossy counterparts.

(Posted on Tuesday, August 4, 2009 at 8:56 PM)