Old audio restoration projects

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_D_
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Old audio restoration projects

Post by _D_ »

Since there seem to be at least some people attempting to restore audio to series like Dragonball and Dr. Slump, I was wondering if there are other series that are looking to get improved audio? If Toei tossed out or erased all their original mixes and only the broadcast audio is available largely through fan sources, who is working on what? I'm 've also seen some sites that collect info about other lost media but unless I start writing it all down, I won't have any idea what to look for...
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Drew_Sutton
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by Drew_Sutton »

Did Toei lose all of their masters? You mentioned Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball (including Z, too, I imagine) which are some heavy hitters.

Stereo broadcasts didn't become the norm until the 90s in Japan, I think. Probably anything that was broadcast then but LD/DVD/BR releases are still featuring mono sound from the 80s and before would be the ideal targets for these projects. Although, as I try to think about shows that are 80s, not on DVD/BR/streaming AND unavailable outside of Japan, I'm having a real hard time coming up with titles that would need these touch ups. And if the show needs audio work (enhancing mono to stereo, for example), it's probably going to need some visual work, too. I'm personally not aware of any fan projects taking on these opportunities.
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by SteveH »

We don't know what the true story is. My theory is about rights and royalties. There was some suit years back, like in the late '90s-early 00's. Must have been then because I remember it on the internet.

Anyway, it had to do with Japanese voice actors getting mad they weren't getting residuals from all that product showing in America. Remember, in the old days there would be no royalties or residuals because it was assumed practice the American licensee would discard all the Japanese in favor of their English dub work. The anime bubble from 1999 to appx. 2006 (and continuing to a lesser amount today) was a LOT of money in the hands of the studios but the seiyuu didn't see a penny. So an adjustment was made.

And suddenly Sunrise has to 'rebuild' the Gundam movies. I think they even dumped the 'borrowed' Toei sound effects.

I'm probably wrong. It makes sense that some of the 'big titles' from Toei would suddenly have their audio vanish, because they would have to pay all the seiyuu (or their families, given how much time has passed and how many of the classic voices have died) money they didn't use to pay. But maybe That's just crazy conspiracy stuff, hah? :)
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by SteveH »

Oh, and Stereo broadcast was a thing in Japan before 1985. I had some off-air Lupin III 'new series' that had a broadcast stereo 'bug' in the corner and that was 1982.
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by _D_ »

Well, there was 2 channel transmissions in Japan on some channels. I have a couple shows like Lou Grant and Cagney and Lacey with English audio on one track and Japanese on the other. A weird curio. No, it's believed Toei erased or otherwise discarded the audio masters since in the early to mid 80s there was no big home video market for anime titles. It would have been expensive to keep all those reels and they were doing so many episodes in a year that it was just impractical to keep everything. I do know that the movie audio masters were kept but just about everything else was discarded. That's why some fans are looking to try to restore the audio. And I'll admit, it does sound much cleaner and clearer than on the releases over here where only the optical track audio is available. But it's a daunting task that the studio itself doesn't want to do apparently though good off air recordings of all the episodes are available. But if you are looking for stuff like that online, good luck as there are few sources...
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by SteveH »

_D_ wrote:Well, there was 2 channel transmissions in Japan on some channels. I have a couple shows like Lou Grant and Cagney and Lacey with English audio on one track and Japanese on the other. A weird curio. No, it's believed Toei erased or otherwise discarded the audio masters since in the early to mid 80s there was no big home video market for anime titles. It would have been expensive to keep all those reels and they were doing so many episodes in a year that it was just impractical to keep everything. I do know that the movie audio masters were kept but just about everything else was discarded. That's why some fans are looking to try to restore the audio. And I'll admit, it does sound much cleaner and clearer than on the releases over here where only the optical track audio is available. But it's a daunting task that the studio itself doesn't want to do apparently though good off air recordings of all the episodes are available. But if you are looking for stuff like that online, good luck as there are few sources...
But that makes no sense. "no big home video market" is just completely incorrect. This is the time of the exploding VHS market and the crazy Laser Disc boom. Much of this firmly targeted at Japan's robust rental marketplace.
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by Drew_Sutton »

SteveH wrote:We don't know what the true story is. My theory is about rights and royalties. There was some suit years back, like in the late '90s-early 00's. Must have been then because I remember it on the internet.

Anyway, it had to do with Japanese voice actors getting mad they weren't getting residuals from all that product showing in America. Remember, in the old days there would be no royalties or residuals because it was assumed practice the American licensee would discard all the Japanese in favor of their English dub work. The anime bubble from 1999 to appx. 2006 (and continuing to a lesser amount today) was a LOT of money in the hands of the studios but the seiyuu didn't see a penny. So an adjustment was made.

And suddenly Sunrise has to 'rebuild' the Gundam movies. I think they even dumped the 'borrowed' Toei sound effects.

I'm probably wrong. It makes sense that some of the 'big titles' from Toei would suddenly have their audio vanish, because they would have to pay all the seiyuu (or their families, given how much time has passed and how many of the classic voices have died) money they didn't use to pay. But maybe That's just crazy conspiracy stuff, hah? :)
I remember the Sunrise/Bandai fiasco with the audio for Mobile Suit Gundam TV series - mostly when it came to getting the show released on DVD anywhere (including Japan). For years, Sunrise said the masters were lost or destroyed or rotten or in the bottom drawer of Tomino's desk. Then with only moderate fanfare, all of a sudden, here were these DVDs with suitable audio!

I'd never heard the story of the seiyuu suing for residuals for vocal work though. Suppose that could have been something, too...
SteveH wrote:Oh, and Stereo broadcast was a thing in Japan before 1985. I had some off-air Lupin III 'new series' that had a broadcast stereo 'bug' in the corner and that was 1982.
So, I can go with some of that - to me, stereo as a standard operating procedure in the mid 1980s makes a lot of sense. The only reason I leaned more towards the 90s was that in 1989, Dragonball Z was produced with mono sound. If the sequel to one of the biggest series of the latter half of the decade was using mono sound say, four to five years after it was the norm, something doesn't sound right about that to me. I call it out because when the first Dragon Box DVD sets came out in Japan, they were unique b/c it was the first time the TV series was released for home video and it had been upgraded to stereo. Of course, most of the contemporary media of the 1980s I have from Japan, the bulk are fansubs, a handful of other tape copies and some LDs. Nothing of straight-from-broadcast TVs (and even that would have depended on the source from Japan, too, such as having stereo TV and VCR.
SteveH wrote:
_D_ wrote:Well, there was 2 channel transmissions in Japan on some channels. I have a couple shows like Lou Grant and Cagney and Lacey with English audio on one track and Japanese on the other. A weird curio. No, it's believed Toei erased or otherwise discarded the audio masters since in the early to mid 80s there was no big home video market for anime titles. It would have been expensive to keep all those reels and they were doing so many episodes in a year that it was just impractical to keep everything. I do know that the movie audio masters were kept but just about everything else was discarded. That's why some fans are looking to try to restore the audio. And I'll admit, it does sound much cleaner and clearer than on the releases over here where only the optical track audio is available. But it's a daunting task that the studio itself doesn't want to do apparently though good off air recordings of all the episodes are available. But if you are looking for stuff like that online, good luck as there are few sources...


But that makes no sense. "no big home video market" is just completely incorrect. This is the time of the exploding VHS market and the crazy Laser Disc boom. Much of this firmly targeted at Japan's robust rental marketplace.
I can get behind some of this - if OAVs weren't a thing until 1983 and didn't really become commercially viable until 1984/5/6, I would imagine that a home video market taking similar time to heat up. I could see it being totally feasible as discarding materials from properties before 1982 (for example).
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_D_
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by _D_ »

Stereo audio transmission for television starts in the US in 1983:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multichan ... sion_sound

In Japan since 1978:

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/16/busin ... ystem.html

But vcrs with stereo sound don't come out until 1982 or 83:

http://www.palsite.com/10vcrs.html

However, there was a lot of stuff still being broadcast in mono. To advertise a stereo transmission in the early days on both sides of the ocean, they would put a symbol denoting such on the screen. I just checked some of my old tapes today and sure enough, that symbol is there in the lower left corner. But after having capped several shows on some old tapes recently and then demuxing the audio from the video, the transmission for DBZ at least was definitely in mono. Unfortunately, they also have the 16 Khz bandpass filter on them as they were recorded at a station (KTN) much distant from Tokyo. But the audio sounds very clean compared to the optical track audio on the DBZ TV series releases over here. As for GT, I've heard that they didn't start to transmit that show in stereo until episode #5 or so. I'd have to go back and check that as I have that episode sitting right by the vcr.
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Re: Old audio restoration projects

Post by _D_ »

SteveH wrote:
_D_ wrote:Well, there was 2 channel transmissions in Japan on some channels. I have a couple shows like Lou Grant and Cagney and Lacey with English audio on one track and Japanese on the other. A weird curio. No, it's believed Toei erased or otherwise discarded the audio masters since in the early to mid 80s there was no big home video market for anime titles. It would have been expensive to keep all those reels and they were doing so many episodes in a year that it was just impractical to keep everything. I do know that the movie audio masters were kept but just about everything else was discarded. That's why some fans are looking to try to restore the audio. And I'll admit, it does sound much cleaner and clearer than on the releases over here where only the optical track audio is available. But it's a daunting task that the studio itself doesn't want to do apparently though good off air recordings of all the episodes are available. But if you are looking for stuff like that online, good luck as there are few sources...
But that makes no sense. "no big home video market" is just completely incorrect. This is the time of the exploding VHS market and the crazy Laser Disc boom. Much of this firmly targeted at Japan's robust rental marketplace.
Crazy Laser Disc boom starts to ramp up in the later part of the 1980s. For example, the page count from the Pioneer LD catalogs shows this:

1984 - 93 pages
1986 - 158 pages
1988 - 306 pages

And things like anime box sets on LD don't become a big thing until the early 1990s. But even for Dragonball, they never released a series box set which I can't understand why since other series like Galaxy Express 999 had them. But those sets could be pricey. A Kamen Rider V3 set was 82,000 Yen or about $650USD and the aforementioned Galaxy Express set had to be split into 3. But other than the movies and specials, there was no LD release of DB/Z on LD, at least not in any of my old catalogs or monthly handouts...
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