Top Gun SE specs

[jimmyp58]

Just watched this ... WOW!

'Nuff said!!!!!

Jim

[George Bellefontaine]

Watched it over the weekend and pretty much agree with Shane's assessment. As for the DTS track, my Denon recognizes the 6.1 flag on DTS tracks and the light was on signifying it was a DTS ES discrete, giving lots of directional action in the surrounds.

One thing, though, the bass was a bit overcooked, I do believe, but having said that, I still enjoyed it. Fact is, my HT room has a concrete floor covered with a thick carpet and when those jets were blasting at takeoff from the aircraft carrier, I could feel the rumble though my chair and my pant legs were flapping. Heck, it was like I was sitting there on deck.

Best of all, it was so nice to see this in its original 2:40 ascpect ratio. The ld and first dvd I owned had an aspect ratio of 1:95:1.

[Shane Martin]

One thing, though, the bass was a bit overcooked

The same as the DD laserdisc.

The aspect ratio and the Best Buy bonus disc was a nice plus for this release. Kudos to Paramount all the way around.

[George Bellefontaine]

I don't remember how good the ld soundtrack was, Shane. I gave the ld away after the first dvd came out. But the dvd sound was just so-so and it still was non-anamorphic and it had the wrong OAR. This new release is an overall winner. I'm trying to remember now how many times I've watched Top Gun. Gotta be at least 6 or 7 times, and maybe more.

[Kevin P]

I finally picked up and watched my copy last night. At last, after 18 years, I finally see Top Gun right! I had the VHS and the original letterbox DVD and have watched this movie many times over the years, so the differences (good and bad) are readily apparent.

The picture quality was definitely an improvement over the older DVD. Especially the outdoor/flying scenes, these were like "you were there". Some of the indoor scenes were a bit washed out or grainy, but that is to be expected for a movie that came out 18 years ago (has it been that long? Man I'm getting old) Seeing it in the correct aspect ratio for the first time, it was apparent that some side material was cropped out in the original DVD release.

I listened to the DTS soundtrack (not 6.1 though as my system doesn't do DTS ES) and it was impressive. Loads of bass, dialogue was a lot clearer, surround effects really surrounded, and those subtle sound effects were more apparent (e.g. the radio communications during the opening credits).

You might have noticed that I said "good and bad" when noticing the differences. Well, nothing glaringly bad, except for the additional vocals that were mixed in to the surrounds during "Take My Breath Away" during the love scene. That sounded cheesy to me, as the prior versions of the movie I owned didn't have that, and it seemed to be too loud (the surrounds almost masked out the main vocal in the fronts). Some of the other music sounded like it was changed to add surround material as well.

Other than that, we thoroughly enjoyed this new DVD. This is they way they should have done it the first time around!

[JonMarsh]

Well, I've probably got every LD version of this ever made (including Japanese import), and I'm definitely going to have to pick this up before heading out to ThomasW's next week- should be fun to see how the "overcooked" bass sounds on his 12 DPL IB.! He wants me to tweak up his NEC XG projector, too, so this will give me some additional motiviation.

Ah well, you can't ever go back to the 80's, but with disks like this, you can probably re-live them for a couple of hours. Guess we'll have to settle for that.