Better Sound Quality for Original DBZ?

[Rukawa11]

Having not purchased any Dragonball DVD's/Blu-rays lately, I wonder if they've ever released the Original version with better sound quality? I still remember my shock when FuNi first advertised the Dragon Boxes about seven years ago as the ideal property for fans of the original version, only to realize the audio is in mono. How is it that AnimEigo's Kimagure Orange Road and Eastern Star's Fist of the North Star dvd's have better sound quality despite being older shows?

[Vegard Aune]

The show was produced in mono, however the original TV-broadcast had much clearer audio than what any of the home video releases do. Why? Because Toei literally threw out the source audio recordings leaving us with nothing but second-generation copies of inferior quality for anything past that. The only home release that actually has the original broadcast audio is the Japanese release of the movies... as well as, for some reason, the Taiwanese DVD-release of GT (This is particularly baffling because it proves that the original broadcast audio for GT still exists, yet Toei didn't use it for the Dragon Box, instead settling for the muffled quality that DB and DBZ got).
If you search around a bit you should be able to find a couple of clips of how the show originally sounded, but at the moment, watching the entire show with that sound quality is impossible because Toei actively refuses to use fan-recordings of the original broadcast audio.

[Jinzoningen MULE]

If you want good audio, the Dragon Boxes are probably the best overall. Funimation also did a pretty good job cleaning the audio for the Season Blu-rays, it sounds very clean. Otherwise, unless Funimation ever releases the show with audio based on tapes of the original broadcast, the best audio we'll ever get for that part of the series is Kai. Although unfortunately, the performances themselves in Kai are worse than they were in Z, on top of the cut itself being worse.

[Rukawa11]

The show was produced in mono, however the original TV-broadcast had much clearer audio than what any of the home video releases do. Why? Because Toei literally threw out the source audio recordings leaving us with nothing but second-generation copies of inferior quality for anything past that.

I guess I wasn't imagining my old fansubbed video tapes from 18 years ago having a better sound quality than the Dragon Boxes.

If you want good audio, the Dragon Boxes are probably the best overall. Funimation also did a pretty good job cleaning the audio for the Season Blu-rays, it sounds very clean. Otherwise, unless Funimation ever releases the show with audio based on tapes of the original broadcast, the best audio we'll ever get for that part of the series is Kai. Although unfortunately, the performances themselves in Kai are worse than they were in Z, on top of the cut itself being worse.

The only good thing about Kai was the insert song "Ginyu Tooku Sentai!" It beats the Red Ribbon Army theme song played in that same scene in DBZ.

[Ajay]

It's been mostly covered, but here's a mostly full rundown:

- Dragon Ball, Z, and the first few episodes of GT were all mono. Mono, of course, meaning they had one single channel of audio, which doesn't necessarily say anything about the quality, but rather the 'soundstage'.
- These all sounded fine when first broadcast, which were luckily collected by some wonderful Japanese fans. You can hear samples on YouTube.
- Dragon Ball, Z, and GT have since been rebroadcast on channels like Animax and BS Fuji, but only GT (and the DB/Z movies) retain its master audio. The common theory is that Toei threw the tapes away for the other series, as home releases just weren't a thing back then, and the tapes themselves were large and expensive to store.
- What remains now, and what's used on the home releases, is the optical audio attached to the side of the film masters. Optical audio kinda sucks, sadly, so the difference is pretty staggering.
- The quality of the audio is further decreased as you head to sources outside of Japan due to the quality loss between copies. Funimation attempted to better improve their sound on their latest Blu-ray release through noise-removal and EQ, but that's more of a polished-turd effort than anything. The Dragon Box is still the best public source.

That's the basic stuff, but there are a few more details about where things are now. I suppose the logical follow-up question to the above is, "Well, what's the deal with those fans with high quality audio?"

- A lot of people get very frustrated that there are fans out there who won't make these high quality recordings publicly available, but their intent is to have these released officially, rather than through shady means. Toei outright refused the audio, but Funimation were happy to take it, though made no promises about their use.
- There are two broadcast audio sources from different regions in Japan. One was sourced from regular VHS tapes recorded in a region that applied a low-pass filter to all broadcasts, and the other recorded on Hi8 tapes from a region that didn't touch the audio, at all. You can see the visual differences in the spectral frequency display below:



- The top image is the Hi8 recording from the region with no filter, and the bottom is the filtered VHS recording. Notice how the bottom image has a straight cut-off at a certain mark? That's the major difference between the two. You don't get the same authentic full sound, as a result.
- It's still significantly better than the optical audio, but the reason I point it out links back around to Funimation being interested in the broadcast audio. While it's possible to provide Funimation with the bottom sample, the source for the top sample went totally cold turkey, and unfortunately, nobody can get a hold of them. The whole point is for Funimation to have the absolute top source possible, so until that can be provided, everything's at a total standstill.

Here's an audio comparison (VHS vs Hi8)

You can hear how much fuller the second sample is.

It's frustrating, but I suppose Funi will eventually get the lesser source, if the better one can't be provided.

We sort of have a general discussion thread for this topic, but it's mixed in with totally separate Harmony Gold talk, so I'm happy to let this one stay. There's a good chunk of info in that thread, so it's worth a glance, though!

[Rukawa11]

These all sounded fine when first broadcast, which were luckily collected by some wonderful Japanese fans. You can hear samples on YouTube.

I think my heart ached after watching that video. The sound quality is so grand compared to the mono tracks on the DVDs.

I can't get the (VHS vs Hi8) audio comparison to play, btw. I wonder if it has something to do with my browser?

Thanks for the technical information. I never realized Toei had messed up that badly by actually throwing the tapes away.

[Ajay]

I think my heart ached after watching that video. The sound quality is so grand compared to the mono tracks on the DVDs.

I can't get the (VHS vs Hi8) audio comparison to play, btw. I wonder if it has something to do with my browser?

Thanks for the technical information. I never realized Toei had messed up that badly by actually throwing the tapes away.

No problem. Here's a direct link. Maybe that'll help!

[DBZimran]

Here is a full Hi8 sample of the broadcast audio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oBOiPUYs30
Originally uploaded by Kei17.

[Rukawa11]

When I think of the effort Toei went through to "clean the dirt" and enhance the footage for their Dragon Boxes, it's almost embarrassing to think that such a release would be accompanied by a mono audio track. Do Dragonball and Dragonball GT suffer the same fate? Regarding DB, apart from Funimation's "remastered box sets," I've purchased Madman Entertainment''s Australian release and for some reason they have the "Japanese 2.0 Stereo" option instead of the mono.

[VegettoEX]

Again, it being in mono (one channel) versus stereo (two channels) doesn't have much to do with the fidelity and clarity of the sound. Since the Japanese track was initially mastered to mono, and individual voice / effects / music tracks are no longer available, there's no way to go back and create a proper stereo track.

Any release that claims to have a "stereo" version of the Japanese audio track is literally just encoding the same mono track into both channels on one stereo track. FUNimation did this with the Dragon Box sets, for example; it's the exact same audio as the Japanese track (which was truly mono), but just duplicated into a stereo track. You gain nothing this way, but some receivers don't play nicely with a legitimately-mono audio track, so I can see where they might be coming from having mastered it this way.

Most of GT was in fact mastered with a stereo audio track, and has been re-run that way on Japanese cable channels, but this was not made available on the Japanese home release.

[Robo4900]

Indeed. A huge amount of TV from before about 1995 was all in mono, and sounds fine. Hell, all the old Warner Bros. cartoons are in mono, yet they sound great. Mono in itself isn't a problem, the only thing added by stereo is the illusion that sound moves from side to side. If you're wearing headphones, this illusion can go further, and make it seem like the sound is coming from any conceivable direction, but in the end, stereo vs mono is like 2D vs 3D in films; sure, there's a difference, and a lot of people enjoy 3D more, but 2D isn't inherently bad.

[Gog]

The dragon boxe's are your best bet. Unless you want to go and edit the episodes of dragon ball z, so that they all have better sound quality. All 400 episodes of course.

[Kendamu]

The cleanest Japanese audio, from my experience, comes from the Blu-rays. There used to be a comparison on YouTube, but that channel was shut down by copyright claims from Toei.

Still, while it's better, it's not so much better that it makes up for the 16:9 cropping and some of the shoddy remastering that's apparent around the 5th or 6th volume. Some would say the whole thing is horrible, though.

If you can afford it, the Dragon Box is still the best way to go. I suppose you could rip the JP audio from the Blu-rays and put them on the DBox video if you really need to.

[Jinzoningen MULE]

The cleanest Japanese audio, from my experience, comes from the Blu-rays. There used to be a comparison on YouTube, but that channel was shut down by copyright claims from Toei.

I've had the same experience, although many will insist that the Blu-ray audio "hurts their ears", or that it's fantastically horrible in some other way. I personally think those accusations are absolute bullshit.

While I'd admit that the Boxes have the best audio overall, the Blu-rays are certainly not bad if it's a priority of yours, they probably even sound better with some speaker setups.

[dougo13]

Here is a full Hi8 sample of the broadcast audio.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oBOiPUYs30
Originally uploaded by Kei17.

Even on my cheap $5 computer speakers, this sounds very nice. I haven't pulled out any tapes in a long time to check audio samples as the last of my Beta Hifi equipment is pretty well defunct and will no longer play tapes without a complete overhaul which would set me back many hundreds of dollars. So it goes...

[dougo13]

Well, I found some old VHS tapes with the start of the Majin Buu saga on them and just did a recording to my Pioneer DVD recorder and played through to my Samsung 4K TV with admittedly not the greatest speakers and the audio was very clean indeed. But it should be shouldn't it? I found this while researching video audio formats:

"VHS and S-VHS use the same methods for sound recording and reproduction, so we’ll start with them. There are two separate types of audio on a VHS tape – HiFi and Linear. The HiFi track is stereo, has a broad dynamic range and very low noise. In fact, when properly recorded, you would have a hard time distinguishing it from CD sound. HiFi audio is recorded (with a separate head) along with the video signal as the tape passes by the rotating video drum. Linear audio is recorded along the edge of the tape with a stationary head – just like a cassette deck.
8mm and Hi8 use a method similar to the VHS HiFi approach, except Sony has dubbed this “AFM”; audio (Audio Frequency Modulation). AFM is usually mono on 8mm cameras and stereo on Hi8 decks. Although the specs are not quite as good as VHS HiFi, the sound is very clean. There is no provision for linear track audio on the 8mm format. Some Hi8 decks (but not all) include a stereo digital soundtrack recorded separately from the AFM sound. The quality of this digital soundtrack is similar to FM radio and has the added ability to be recorded after the video has been shot."

I can provide a few samples but I also want to rip the audio track into Goldwave or some other audio processing software to see how it looks. I have quite a few tapes of DBZ that I could do this way but it's time consuming. By rights, Beta HIfi should be even better as the audio was recorded along with the video signal, which couldn't be done owing to bandwidth limitations in VHS Hi-Fi. But as I said, my Beta HiFi playback equipment is pretty well defunct now, so only the VHS tapes are available and those were recorded in VHS EP (though for sound purposes, that doesn't matter much)...

[DB1984]

Toei was too cheap to keep the original audio masters. Every other Anime studio kept them for their productions. Toei was the only one who was too lazy.

[Jinzoningen MULE]

Toei was too cheap to keep the original audio masters. Every other Anime studio kept them for their productions. Toei was the only one who was too lazy.

Oh, this tired old line... It had nothing to do with laziness. The audio was expensive to keep and home releases were not a common practice of the time. They had no reason to keep the audio as far as they knew, these are human beings, they don't have future-vision. Toei's refusal of Kei's audio is really their only "sin" against the fandom.

[dougo13]

Well, I did some tests on the VHS HiFi track and hope to post some results. I HOPE you aren't getting the kind of audio that the regular mono track produces (the linear track) as that is indeed very muffled and low in volume. You can really tell the difference in quality when you listen to things like the music tracks and then change audio tracks (VHS HiFi decks allow you to change from Hifi to left/right tracks, to linear or a mix of hifi and linear). The first thing I notice is the tape hiss disappears as well, the volume improves. Things the characters are saying become much clearer. Then, there is much more depth in things like echos in caves or with sound effects. Dunno if these transmissions were in the region where they clipped the audio (sure would like to know) or not. I can't remember if these were from cable either and I can no longer ask my friend who recorded them. Well, I have to get along to transferring the test recordings to DVD and then ripping the audio to mpeg audio so I can examine them. Gotta get onto that...

[dougo13]

Toei was too cheap to keep the original audio masters. Every other Anime studio kept them for their productions. Toei was the only one who was too lazy.

Oh, this tired old line... It had nothing to do with laziness. The audio was expensive to keep and home releases were not a common practice of the time. They had no reason to keep the audio as far as they knew, these are human beings, they don't have future-vision. Toei's refusal of Kei's audio is really their only "sin" against the fandom.

Actually, home video was pretty much in full swing in both the US and Japan by 1986 when DB debuted. But there could have been any number of reasons why the audio masters were not kept. My own speculation is money. Too much money needed to keep something that might or might have any value in the future (though by 1986 they should have taken a cue from the BBC and kept everything they made). Toei was well known for being a rather stingy studio, unlike say, Tezuka Pro that kept everything. We'll probably never know what really went down anyway. Ah well, hindsight...