yeah ac3 is amazingly small in size. The reason it sounds better to you is because your fold down is louder. Louder sounds better hence the loudness wars.
Don't get me wrong. I'm more along the lines of an audiophile and have taken this all into account. The original Opeth albums actually seem to be no better when it comes to the loudness wars. Every file of there's I load into Audacity has tons of clipping and such.
If you decode the .vob files to dts and load that into Audacity (I believe it requires a plugin), what you find is 5 separate channels that each have NO clipping. You can save this with a custom downmixing, setting each channel where it needs to go. L/R (front and back) obviously go, well, left and right. Center goes to both channels. You need to drop the gain on the center channel more so than the others, as it sticks it in both channels equally to the value you set it.
You do need to drop the overall gain of ALL channels so that the downmixed file doesn't introduce clipping (and it is possible). For both Still Life and Watershed, I've found that the front and back L/R channels work best with equal gain settings. The center channel in Still Life was set considerably lower than the rest (otherwise the vocals and other parts of the track are entirely too loud). Watershed actually had the center channel having a closer gain to the other channels compared to Still Life.
The result is an Opeth album with no clipping from the source to the result, among better quality in many other ways. They're quiter than the CD mix, that's for sure!
I'm a huge Opeth fan, but rarely do I actually sit at home - the only place I have a 5.1 setup - and listen to music. I'm a little skeptical to believe that mixing an album myself will turn out better than the original...
You'd be surprised. If you listen to Still Life, it's missing some detail. It sounds a bit...muddy... suppressed, even. Hell, it even has channel drop outs (listen to "Face of Melinda")! To my surprised, the 5.1 mix does NOT have this! What you also find is better clarity in instruments, resulting in a much cleaner sound. I'm not talking about a sound that you can reproduce by upping the treble frequency with an equalizer.
The same can be said for Watershed. It's a cleaner sound. Better instrument separation, sound stage, you name it. Some of the guitar work gets lost in the sound on the CD mix...and it's still a bit apparent in the 5.1 mix as well, but it is better. In particular, I found the vocals in "Porcelain Heart" to be easier to understand. They're no louder or softer than the CD mix either.
It takes a LOT of trial and error to take the 5 channels and downmix it properly to 2. It does require that you listen a lot to the CD so you can get an idea what gains should be set for what channels (mostly the center). That said, there are still some times when taking 5.1 and downmixing it results in weirdness (I can think of only one small spot on Still Life, though). It's just the way they remixed some of the channels.
I can assure you that this is not some BS. It's still roughly CD quality, so don't get me wrong. It's no miracle. The resulting WAV file after all of this for an album sits right around 700MB. That said, it sounds like what the album SHOULD have sounded like compared to what you actually got.
BTW, the program I used to extract the DTS audio from the VOB file was called DGIndex.
Update: Just doing some quick work with the 5.1 Blackwater Park mix...the improvements aren't as noticeable with this recording. So far, Still Life has turned out the best followed by Watershed.
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