Koe no Katachi – A Silent Voice

Nazaki is not feeling well, so I’ve been given the task of making the release post. Oh boy.

First, I want to thank the staff who worked on this over the years.

• TL: Areki
• Edit: Nazaki
• Timing: Hybrid21
• QC: begna112
• Encode: Saeval (though we aged out of the original AVS encode), LightArrowsEXE
• TS: Asakura, iFanz

I wish I could say that this was a ton of fun to work on despite the literal years of delay in getting it over the finish line. But I can’t. I think everyone felt it was a slog and the more the community absolutely hounded the staff working on it, the worse it became.

Most of you are probably already aware that a version of this was released early a few days ago on another account. That version wasn’t even the final version. I don’t know exactly how much “didn’t make it”, but I can say for sure that at least some since 04/02/23 wasn’t final.

Not going to make promises that this version is perfect or above reproach, there’s probably still errors or fuck-ups in it. But I took some of the items that were sent to us from that early release and implemented them here. Did not have the time or willpower to do anything extensive.

Regardless, this is our final release of this and unless something has gone catastrophically wrong, we will not be releasing another version.

Finally, I want to address a few items that are likely to be “controversial”:

• “It’s letterboxed!” – There’s 44 rows of pixels of black lines making it 1920×1036 + black bars. That’s a non-standard aspect ratio anyway, and fuck you if you think it’s important to have those removed. A decent chunk of the typesetting was done by an outside contributor who did it on a full 1080p video, so we stuck with it. It was just easier and we had no interest in making this project even more work than it already was. Unlike some people, we aren’t used to hijacking other people’s scripts and then adjusting tens of thousands of lines of typesetting.

• “It’s a weird audio format! DTS-HP:X? What’s that!?” – The stereo track included with the movie is a proprietary format intended to provide a “surround sound” experience on headphones. There was no standard stereo track. Unfortunately, you can’t reencode or trim DTS-HD formats without some kind of loss in at least quality, you also can’t transfer the virtual surround sound to any other format. We decided it would be ideal to leave this as-is. Clearly, the studio wanted you to hear this in surround. Any player such as mpv, plex, etc should be able to decode the standard stereo from it, without the surround options. On Windows, you can purchase an extension for your PC to enable it.

• “Ew! Flac!?” – Yeah, fuck off. We have always done flac and that’s not gonna change.

• “Which audio source did you use? Other releases said to use some other source.” – Other releases can make their own decisions, but ultimately I believe they are making the wrong assumptions and drawing false conclusions. ITA and US blurays have significant post-processing errors, causing additional noise at all frequencies, but also smearing and detail loss at both the high and low end. The US blurays take that a step further, knowing that the added noise from whatever source first added it is bad, and tried to run a silencing filter on it. Silencing filters are a scourge to audio. They always result in major alterations to the original audio. It’s easy to see that ITA and US are based on the same post-processed source because of the same patterns of degradation at the high end. Take a look for yourself at the comparisons from Hyde, which are generally being referenced across all releases. The sub track, being mostly empty, makes the post-processing extremely obvious (the blurred orange bands at the top and the easing of noise in the middle frequencies) and you can see this overlaid across all the other channels as well, while the JP sub track has an evenly distributed grain. The other major difference between the JP and ITA/US blurays is the gain level (volume). The JP blurays are slightly quieter in peak volume and have a slightly smaller range between the quietest and loudest sounds. ITA = 23.5/23.7 DR, -0.51/-0.86 Peak, -30.9/-31.4 RMS; JP = 21.1/21.2 DR, -2.22/-2.07 Peak, -29.9/-30.2 RMS; The only number which will actually translate to a difference in your brain is RMS and these numbers are so similar that you are going to perceive the same “loudness” in both. That said, adding noise and dithering audio are well-known tricks in the industry to fake Dynamic Range measurements. Regardless, people who don’t know what they’re talking about will automatically assume “higher Dynamic Range means it’s better and Dynamic Range Compression must be bad.” This is flatly false. The only thing that matters for our purposes is being as similar as possible to the original master. And, in this case, there’s no way for us to know what was intended or what the mastered audio looked like before it was sent to partners… But we do know that ITA and US blurays were processed for other purposes and have hallmarks of audio manipulation, while the JP blurays do not, other than, perhaps, some clipping, which may be an intentional mastering decision to optimize for RMS instead of peak. Our conclusion must be that the JP blurays are likely closer to the original mastered audio because it’s the least processed.

• “So there was a leak…? Tell me more.” – No. Fuck off. Go farm your drama somewhere else.

1080p: Anidex | Nyaa.si | Magnet | DDL