Buying the blu-ray version when you already have the DVD...

[Woochifer]

Yes I have an eye on the Blade Runner but I won't spend more than $20 on a movie. The prices always end up coming way down and I am going to be patient. Ever since I got screwed over on Schindler's List DVD boxed set I have learned my lesson. I bought it for $75 when it came out. A month and one day later it was $26.99. Blu Ray is coming out at near double the price of DVD. There is no excuse for one movie to be $12.99 and another one like Blade Runner to be $36.99. It is a cash grab IMO.

Blade Runner has been out for almost three years now. There's a reason why that set remains expensive -- it's a FIVE DISC set. It's about as extensive and thorough a BD set as you will find for any single movie. If the price goes down in the future, it will only be because a single-disc movie-only edition came out.

The BD set has the five different complete versions of Blade Runner -- the new final cut that Ridley Scott put together in 2007, and the four different versions that came out in theaters at some point. This includes the American and International voice-over versions from 1982, and the "director's cut" that was widely released in 1992 and for years remained the only version out on DVD. The BD set also includes the rare workprint version that was only shown to test audiences in 1982, and to audiences in LA and SF in 1991 during limited week-long releases (I was there), which got the whole Blade Runner revival going by showing the movie for the first time in public without Harrison Ford's voiceover and the happy ending.

The set also has a brand new documentary that clocks in at over 3 1/2 hours, commentaries galore, audio recordings with Philip Dick, 48 minutes of deleted and alternate scenes, more documentaries on the technical stuff, and yet another documentary that summarizes all of the changes made between the different versions of the movie.

The thing that was frustrating about my Pioneer Elite reciever was the vocal track. You would have to turn it up to hear the dialog and then an explosion would blow you into next week.

Starting point would be level matching all of the speakers with a SPL meter. I use a +3.5 db offset for my center speaker.

If you have to fiddle with the bloody remote the entire movie - it's a crappy system IMO.

Or that's the original intent of the soundtrack. The receiver has no say in how the audio engineer chooses to mix the various sound elements in a 5.1 mix.

Plus, if your previous system was a Prologic setup, and you were feeding it a downmixed 5.1 soundtrack rather than a dedicated 2.0 Dolby Surround track, the dialog is not going to sound right. In order for the center channel to be properly balanced (assuming you've level matched your system), you need either a discrete 5.1 playback on a 5.1 receiver, or a dedicated 2.0 playback on a Prologic or 5.1 receiver. Playing a 5.1 soundtrack through the L/R analog outputs on a DVD player will ensure that the sound effects from the L/R/LS/RS channels drown out the center channel because of how the downmixing by the DVD player is done at fixed levels.

Sorry take no stock in my comment about Pioneer Elite - my Elite was back in the mid 1990s VSX-95 - new receivers are entirely different animals compared to back then. My current marantz 4300 which is $300 sounds better than the $2000 VSX 95 I had. The VSX 95 was their top of the line model with the rosewood side panels but it sounded dead. In fact the first one I bought was D.O.A. Pioneer was not as good then. The new flagship models are something like $7000 and are apparently serious beasts.

A few years ago, I A-B'd a midlevel Pioneer Elite receiver against the similarly priced Denon AVR-38XX models, and the Pioneer sounded noticeably better. I know that with that particular series, Pioneer made a serious effort to upgrade their receivers and challenge the established players in the mid and high end receiver market. Someone did a teardown on those Pioneer's receivers and indicated that there was no way they could have made much money with the components they were using. I have no idea if they subsequently decontented their receivers in their more recent releases, but the ones they made a few years ago were very well executed.