I’ve been called an audio snob before, but trust me, there are people waaaaay worse than me. We’ve been watching Wall-E for a while now,after the first time we watched it, Eddie fell in love with it and likes watching it. Granted, we all love the movie, great story, great characters, absolutely adorable. But I couldn’t get over how flat the sound was. There was no impact when the rockets were thundering and Eve’s laser shots were anorexic. I just wrote this off that maybe the films makers didn’t want to scare kids and kept the audio stuff to a minimum.
However, just the other day, I realized that this DVD is in a short list of those annoying discs that have the 2 channel audio mix as the default! Thusly we’re being force fed the crappy Dolby surround mix. You have to work your way through those silly menus to switch the audio to the setting it should be at in the first place. Even if someone doesn’t have a 5 channel setup, the player will navigate this on its own and give you the stereo mix. It doesn’t do it in the reverse however.
Needless to say, watching it with the correct audio mix made a world of difference and was like watching a whole new movie. What the hell was DIsney thinking?!
They weren’t.
(By the way… longtime fan, first time commenter. Evil half to. Hi!)
Agreed
They don’t. And there’s nothing wrong with being an audio snob; the guys who worked on that put a lot of effort into making the movie sound as good as possible. Totally worth seeing it again.
In other news, I would love to be able to afford a surround sound systems. T.T
Howdy! ^_^
I do find that odd, considering how important the sound design was to the film (I loved the doco on disc one, and continue to believe Ben Burtt is the God of Sound.) Looks like putting Pixar at the head of Disney did not increase the intelligence in all sectors
Moggamighty, now I need to go back and watch it again. That’s not being a snob, that’s expecting the best (and knowing how to find it!), and there’s a huge difference.
Thanks for the tip!
Let me know if your disc was set up the same way, I know it wasn’t the DVD player’s fault, and if it sounds better.
Well, “yarg”. I’m playing this on my computer, and the sound settings seem to be driven by PowerDVD rather than the disk. I get nothing when I click the Setup options.
In the next few days I can take this over to my son’s house where he has a real DVD player, and see what it does over there. I’ll let you know.
Mine is set up to auto-detect for best sound, and I had no issues…sounded almost as good as the theatre. Is your DVD player set up to use what you preferred for your sound system?
I have a Pioneer DVD player, and my brother has speakers(tall cabinet speakers set into a stereo cabinet that are frightful expensive I’m told) and others set up all over the room.
Yep, everything was set as much as it can be. This just happens to be the third DVD that I own that seems to want to play the dumbed-down audio track as the default.
I wonder if Disney dumbed down the audio for the DVD. You think the Blu-ray may have been better?
Not sure, but I wouldn’t put it past them. I do know that when I switched the DVD to 5.1 there was a huge difference in sound though.