I watched the initial three episodes on my local PBS station HD channel over the air and the rest from the DVD set. It's great to see a Ken Burns production in widescreen 16:9; this is a first. I didn’t see any degradation of the images on the DVDs compared to the HDTV telecasts, but I found it immensely more involving due to the Dolby Digital 5.
1 surround soundtracks. As with many low-budget PBS outlets, my local station is not yet able to broadcast in full surround all the shows that come in with DD 5.1 soundtracks.
They just carry them in stereo. All the war footage with Burns and his crew obtained from the National Archives, Smithsonian and other sources was silent footage. After the images were locked down, they worked for a full year creating the soundtracks for the series, and the perfectly synchronized and realistic-sounding explosions and gunshots give the footage a huge boost in immediacy.
The deep bass of many of the war sounds rumbled my subwoofer seriously. When combined with the footage of the actual action the impact of the shots was amplified greatly. The disastrous landing at Utah Beach in Normandy, for example, struck me as more emotionally draining than the dramatic treatment Spielberg gave the event in Private Ryan.
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