Defective or Disappointing UK Anime Discs

Jaysgba said:
As pointed out by @Joshawott, the 5.1 Japanese track is out of sync for Voices of a Distant Star. The alternate track with Shinkai doing voices, which is how I watched it, is fine though.
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I don't think my check-disc has the alternate Shinkai track (was it added later?) so I was hoping it may have been caught and resolved since, but if I remember correctly, you said your copy was retail? For more detail, the audio feels like it plays 0.5-1 second too soon; which is really noticeable with lip-syncing and action scenes. The 2.0 track seems fine though.

If only I had watched these discs earlier and caught it sooner...
 
Joshawott said:
I don't think my check-disc has the alternate Shinkai track (was it added later?) so I was hoping it may have been caught and resolved since, but if I remember correctly, you said your copy was retail? For more detail, the audio feels like it plays 0.5-1 second too soon; which is really noticeable with lip-syncing and action scenes. The 2.0 track seems fine though.

If only I had watched these discs earlier and caught it sooner...
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Mine is a retail copy from MCM London. Have you checked in the bonus features section for the alternate audio track?
 
Just Passing Through said:
Got my replacement When Marnie Was There today. Zavvi annoyed me by insisting on sending me a replacement, when I sent back the original for a refund, but they put a little sugar on top by replacing my standards Blu-ray with the Collector's Edition with the digipack and postcards.
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That reminds me of when I imported the Australian release of Genius Party years ago. I received the double pack including the film and its sequel, despite only requesting the former!
 
Just Passing Through said:
Beyond the Boundary Blu-ray Episode 2 15:35 has a video glitch that persists for a couple of frames, as noted here.
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I noticed this way back when Sentai's BD was initially released. Whilst nowhere near as severe, the Japanese BD too exhibits glitches in the exact same frames in the form of a Black dot. No idea if it was present on the streams. Makes me wonder if they tried patching the dot out by using previous frames.
 
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Oh dear. At least there's a swift recall for those affected. I like being able to go straight to green text in the list.

R
 
Pretty embarrassing for Manga - especially as YuGiOh is one of there better selling titles right now.

I mean, surely a check over the discs would prevent stuff like that happening? I mean, there could have been porn on that rogue disc or something and presumably no-one would have known.
 
Lutga said:
I mean, surely a check over the discs would prevent stuff like that happening? I mean, there could have been porn on that rogue disc or something and presumably no-one would have known.
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Reminds of a story from a few years ago where parents who ordered a dvd of their children's theatre performance were accidentally sent discs that had porn on them.
 
We're ribbing Manga, but they managed to catch it and sort it before any of us noticed. Which, given our aggressive track record at spotting AL mistakes, is worth more than we'd probably like to admit.
 
I think these issues are usually caused by the replicator mixing up files so not really Manga's fault, as they will have checked different content when they submitted it. It's just one of those things. A quick confession and recall is a good response.

R
 
Jaysgba said:
As pointed out by @Joshawott, the 5.1 Japanese track is out of sync for Voices of a Distant Star. The alternate track with Shinkai doing voices, which is how I watched it, is fine though.
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Well I watched VoaDS, and while the out of sync 5.1 audio is a disappointment, it's not as much of a disappointment as I thought. For one thing, the Shinkai scratch track is in 5.1 and is in sync, but more importantly, the Japanese surround tracks are the weedy DVD audio, DD 5.1 at 448 kbps. I stuck the stereo on, and that's uncompressed PCM at 2.3Mbps, and the difference is palpable. It's not just numbers, you can hear how much richer and more vibrant the stereo track is. Now if the Japanese 5.1 has been DTS-HD MA just like the English, then it would have been reason to gripe!
 
Just Passing Through said:
Well I watched VoaDS, and while the out of sync 5.1 audio is a disappointment, it's not as much of a disappointment as I thought. For one thing, the Shinkai scratch track is in 5.1 and is in sync, but more importantly, the Japanese surround tracks are the weedy DVD audio, DD 5.1 at 448 kbps. I stuck the stereo on, and that's uncompressed PCM at 2.3Mbps, and the difference is palpable. It's not just numbers, you can hear how much richer and more vibrant the stereo track is. Now if the Japanese 5.1 has been DTS-HD MA just like the English, then it would have been reason to gripe!
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Perhaps a dumb question, but why isn't it?
 
That's a question for Andrew, but I can guess that it comes down to materials. Maybe they could source the original uncompressed audio for the English dub from ADV, but not the Japanese. And given how ADV operated, they were quite likely to create 5.1 tracks in house from the Japanese stereo source, and the original Japanese audio for VoaDS might never have been 5.1, which makes the stereo track authentic.

I've had a look for the Japanese BD release of VoaDS, and it's on their global edition of 5 Centimeters per Second. That Blu-ray has PCM 4.0 and 2.0 audio, but one source said that its extra features, including VoaDS were all in SD. One thing's for certain given that spec listing is that VoaDS certainly doesn't have a native 5.1 audio track.

EDIT: That 'global' edition of 5 Centimeters Per Second is probably why it hasn't seen a dedicated English territory Blu-ray release, and probably won't, unless it's priced at over £60 RRP
 
Buzz201 said:
Perhaps a dumb question, but why isn't it?
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As far as I know relatively few JP releases even have 5.1 audio (some previous titles have had the US companies having to make their own for the sub track). It's not at all popular over there and everything is in stereo by default, but buyers in the west expect 5.1 for their fancy setups and dubs tend to get treated better. Which is why there was so much anger when a certain premium US anime distributor put lossy dub audio on their localised discs. While I'm prepared to be corrected, for an artsy release like VoaDS it may well be that there's no full HD audio version of that particular track available at all.

(Disclaimer: I own no 5.1 equipment myself and never have so cannot be said to be an avid follower of this particular niche.)

R

Edit: JustPa knows more!
 
Just Passing Through said:
That's a question for Andrew, but I can guess that it comes down to materials. Maybe they could source the original uncompressed audio for the English dub from ADV, but not the Japanese. And given how ADV operated, they were quite likely to create 5.1 tracks in house from the Japanese stereo source, and the original Japanese audio for VoaDS might never have been 5.1, which makes the stereo track authentic.

I've had a look for the Japanese BD release of VoaDS, and it's on their global edition of 5 Centimeters per Second. That Blu-ray has PCM 4.0 and 2.0 audio, but one source said that its extra features, including VoaDS were all in SD. One thing's for certain given that spec listing is that VoaDS certainly doesn't have a native 5.1 audio track.

EDIT: That 'global' edition of 5 Centimeters Per Second is probably why it hasn't seen a dedicated English territory Blu-ray release, and probably won't, unless it's priced at over £60 RRP
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Just seems weird to me that they wouldn't up the quality a bit more than DVD, even if it was still lossy.

I believe Discotek have announced a US-specific release of 5cm/s is coming?

Rui said:
As far as I know relatively few JP releases even have 5.1 audio (some previous titles have had the US companies having to make their own for the sub track). It's not at all popular over there and everything is in stereo by default, but buyers in the west expect 5.1 for their fancy setups and dubs tend to get treated better. Which is why there was so much anger when a certain premium US anime distributor put lossy dub audio on their localised discs. While I'm prepared to be corrected, for an artsy release like VoaDS it may well be that there's no full HD audio version of that particular track available at all.

(Disclaimer: I own no 5.1 equipment myself and never have so cannot be said to be an avid follower of this particular niche.)

R

Edit: JustPa knows more!
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If it's the company who I think it is (not sure I can name them without this getting moved to the price complaints thread to die), what's even more amusing is that Anime Limited's much cheaper release apparently did include uncompressed audio. Whether it was lossless or not, who knows. But I did find it especially amusing that everyone kept plugging the US release when AL's was objectively better in some regards.
 
Buzz201 said:
If it's the company who I think it is (not sure I can name them without this getting moved to the price complaints thread to die), what's even more amusing is that Anime Limited's much cheaper release apparently did include uncompressed audio. Whether it was lossless or not, who knows. But I did find it especially amusing that everyone kept plugging the US release when AL's was objectively better in some regards.
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Yeah, there have been a few cases where we have ended up with a better version of something. Frankly, it should happen more than it does since the 'Japanese people can't use region B discs' logic is trotted out a lot when it doesn't favour us to justify redoing or locking discs, though shared materials are partly to blame.

It's why I'm such a big fan of the freedom to import the version I want most rather than sticking loyally to a particular distributor. If there are premium releases elsewhere then it doesn't bother me so much when some series I place on a pedestal gets poor treatment here (and if the premium releases suck, thank heavens for the budget ones!) My ideal options would be sub-only ultra premium edition (importing from Japan), then with a normal premium and standard option with multiple language tracks available for people who aren't buying direct from Japan, wherever they originate from. But I digress heavily.

It's fine to mention them, things just get moved out of that particular thread because it ends up as 5 pages of rage about a different company and people who go to it to answer AL stuff (like the AL reps) have to wade through it all to have a prayer of finding the actual questions ;)

R
 
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