The Last Crusade film mix

[mxsch 115]

Is it me or the film mix of TLC is different from the album and much better?

 

 

[Jay 37,346]

Yes I've wondered if the 1989 era digital mixes were only used for the album (and Concord), and they used a different analog mix for the film itself. I don't know the answer. 

[Naïve Old Fart 9,513]

Lots of films are mixed differently, for stereo, as opposed to multichannel.

The remix engineer is trying to get 32 (or whatever) channels into two, so things are bound to sound different. Add to this, the vagaries of the composer/producer.

Also, the music must compete with sound effects and voices; something which it does not need to do, on the CD, leading to instruments which were either prominent, or not, in the film, being reversed, on the two-channel mix.

@mxsch, have you listened to an iso (or as near as you can get it) of ...LAST CRUSADE? What differences do you mean?

@Jay, was ...LAST CRUSADE recorded digitally? If it was, it's among the worst digital recordings I've ever heard.

It sounds a lot closer to RAIDERS... in it's dryness, than the - at times, shrill - ...TEMPLE OF DOOM.

[Jay 37,346]

The back of the Last Crudade OST CD says ADD, which means it was recorded analog - unless that was a mistake. 

 

The real reason TLC sounds the way it does is because Dan Wallin put up acoustic separators between instrument sections 

 

On 16/08/2021 at 3:04 PM, Jay said:

When Dan Wallin recorded The Last Crusade, he put walls up (acoustic separators) between instrument sections.  So even though the orchestra was the same size as Temple of Doom's (and many of the players were the same), the resulting recording sounds smaller because of this recording technique he chose to use.

 

On top of this recording technique, it seems that even if nice proper analog tape was running to capture every take of every cue (let's hope this is true!), he edited the score digitally, meaning 1989-era digital technology lost a lot of the clarity those theoretical analog tapes would have held.  Since the OST album and Concord expansion were both assembled from these 1989 digital mixes, we are hoping that analog tape will be uncovered and freshly transferred and a new Crusade album could be rebuilt from scratch from that.

 

But even if that happens, it's unclear just how much of an impact Wallin's recording technique would have no matter what original source material is used.