I recently had a chance to rewatch two quality movies on Blu-Ray.  Both, “Cars” and “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World” were very good DVD releases and I looked forward to comparing and contrasting them on Blu-Ray.  In watching them both in sequence, I realized that there is a very large difference in the quality of the video and audio on Blu-Ray.  There’s already plenty of reviews for these movies on the Internet so I won’t bore you with the details of the stories and instead, I’ll contrast the two presentations.

First up for me was Master and Commander.  The DVD release of this movie was fantastic and I expected the Blu-Ray to be a significant increase in the quality of the movie.  From a video standpoint, I was a little let down.  While the image was clearer and had more definition than the DVD, it wasn’t an example of what Blu-Ray is capable of.  The audio, on the other hand, was superb.  So much so that it tainted my appreciation of the Cars audio.  I feel for any movie audio track that has to follow Master and Commander.  All I can say is that for anyone with a serious home theater, you must watch this movie on Blu-Ray.  The audio is about as reference quality as you’ll find.

That said, I also looked forward to Cars.  Everyone rants and raves about how Blu-Ray is best when the source is one of Pixar’s movies, Cars being a definitive example.  I wasn’t disappointed.  The color was simply awesome.  The clarity was just a tad shy of the impression I was left with at the movie theater and that probably has to do with my projector more than it does the movie itself.  I remember thinking that the trees on the side of the road as Mack and McQueen left the first race were so real looking.  The DVD was a let down in the sheer awe department but the Blu-Ray delivered.

This is where the two films diverge for me.  The Master and Commander disc defaulted to DTS-MA whereas for some dumb reason the Cars disc defaulted to Dolby Digital.  Throughout the movie, I remember thinking that the sound was flat and lacked punch.  I expected the opening scene to have significantly better LFE track.  It wasn’t until the end of the movie that I realized I had watched this one with the Dolby Digital track on instead of the DD Uncompressed track.  I remember that the Cars DVD used to default to a 2 channel mix until you set it on DD 5.1.  How or why Disney does this is beyond me as most Blu-Ray players can at least decode to PCM all of the newer formats.  To be fair, I watched the opening sequence of Cars again using the better soundtrack and it was an upgrade, though not as significant as I would have hoped for.

All of this underscores the contrast between the two movies for me.  Master and Commander’s video was good but not stellar while Car’s video will be hard to top.  Meanwhile, the audio on Master and Commander really spoils the listener while the Car’s audio rumbles along at par for the course.  The differences can be blamed on the source material but it is clear that Blu-Ray exposes many more flaws than DVD did and requires much more expertise to properly transfer to disc from the original source.