Intrada Soundtrack Forum

Intrada crew,

I am sitting here listening to the A L I E N presentation - loving every note of it of course - and was thinking that, sometime in the future, might we get to see a remastered, better presentation?

Hear me out - the original presentation was done 8 years ago (!!!) and your standards, shall we say, are considerably ascended. I love this score with heart and soul, but it's so, I don't know, distant in it's stereophonics.

Is there a hope that someday we'll have a variation of the grand magnum opus to whisk us away into the strings, and woodwinds, and everything else, much like your releases today are sounding?

I thank you.

TP

I think the stereo spread and depth is good. The issue to me is that it sounds like the typical Fox elements of the 60s and 70s, where clarity is not ideal and instruments sound a bit muddied.

Labels can only go so far in improving this aspect. I have a lot of 60s/70s Fox soundtrack albums, including "improved" reissues using newer technology, and I've come to realize that this sonic characteristic is simply par for the course.

Yes, that's a better way of describing it - muddled and not clear nor crisp. I do agree about the stereo spread - I misspoke myself in stating that it was stereophonics. I apologize for that.

Maybe one day... I can dream, can't I?

I do think that the recording captures the score's brooding nature quite well even if some cues don't sound perfect. Alien is a very dynamic recording, and that gets through with this album. Much like The Mephisto Waltz, another Goldsmith masterpiece of a horror score recorded for Fox, I find that the pinnacle of clarity is not necessary to provide a high level of effectiveness for this type of score.

But, that's just my own opinion. The sources used for this release are the original multi-track masters if I remember correctly, and not much better can be done with them. Transfer and mastering technology, as well as the mastering sensibilities of those involved, were pretty much top-notch in 2007 as they are today.