audio-only listening of Trek film's soundtrack like a radio drama

[jefferiestubes8]

Has any of you turned off the monitor and just sat and listened with headphones to any of the Trek film's audio-only?
I'd recommend choosing the Dolby 2.0 Dolby Surround option as it already mixed for 2 channels and will work better for headphones.
Recently I listened to ST: First Contact on headphones that I recorded to MP3 while I was on an airplane and the stereo spread is really wide.
I also had some episodes of VOY and ENT. The stereo spread of VOY is nothing like First Contact!
FC is so much more engaging as an audio-only listen. Still entertaining but just much better sound design especially on the Enterprise-E and spread over 2 ears.
Have you guys done this either with headphones or just on the stereo in a darkened room without the TV monitor?
Since ST:FC is a 19 year old film maybe I should try it with STXI which is a very modern sound design.

If you really want to focus on the soundFX and music you can choose one of the foreign language audio options on the blu-ray/DVDs. Especially if you've seen a film so many times and you want something really new out of it.
For example if you've seen even a a film like STV:TFF many times and have the Blu-ray as part of the 'Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection' box set it has Dolby TrueHD 7.1 soundtrack for a film from 1989. I'm guessing it was just upmixed from 5.1 but never the less try out the French Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround or even Spanish Dolby Digital 1.0 MONO mix tracks. You should hear new things since the part of your brain listening for dialogue in English is turned off. It's all SoundFX, Music, and the tone of the voices that should tell the story through audio.

I made an older thread about this for Trek TV shows:
Audio-only Trek TV series experiences
some of the members mentioned that before VHS tapes of TOS they used audio-cassettes as if TOS were a old time radio drama.and plynch mentioned

In another thread someone suggested the TAS works better if you just listen and don't watch the horrendous animation.

Hmm. I may have to try that. Netflix has TAS without commercials.



by the way there are some fan film type productions of shows that are audio-only like old radio plays. They call them Audio Plays see this thread:
Finally - Star Trek audio dramas

 

[ChristopherPike]

I once had an Original Series episode on, while hoping to drift off to sleep. Complete failure, as I lay there listening for the next hour at least. I'd nominate "The Savage Curtain" as suitable for radio because everything that happens, gets verbally explained. Oh look! It's Abraham Lincoln (and he sounds more convincing than Daniel Day Lewis at least). Why it's Surak, father of all we now hold dear. And Colonel Green, who lead a genocidal war early in the 21st Century. "Spock! Help me. Spock!" Give it a try... Perhaps it's just me, knowing each and every line of dialogue that was coming.

 

[Flying Spaghetti Monster]

I have quite a few (I'm hoping to get all of them somehow) episodes as audio only, as I've seen them all enough times, but I enjoy listening to the,m. In the Pale Moonlight is fantastic as audio only. But I gotta try First Contact.

 

[acappellasaurus]

I do this ALL the time, literally! Thought I was the only one! Since I was a kid, I have this weird need to be listening to something as I go to sleep. Music never really works for me, so it ends up being talking of some kind usually. I didn't like the political right wing talk, so I grew up listening to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM. But even that gets old. So I used to hold a cassette recorded up to the TV speakers and record the audio off of VHS tape playbacks to listen to later. A lot of episodes from TOS and TNG work really well as audio dramas, especially if you're a Trek fan and have the sets and actors/characters already in your mind's eye.

Nowadays, in the world of streaming Netflix on your smartphone, and with unlimited data caps or unlimited wifi caps, You can stream all of the episodes from all of the series on Netflix. I listen to Trek almost every night as audio plays, streamed through Netflix, and I love it. It really adds a different aspect to the series, and helps you to catch little vocal nuances that you didn't before. Cool stuff!

 

[SeerSGB]

When I was little I used to love (still do) old audio dramas--back then our local NPR would play old radio dramas once or twice a week, late at night and I'd stay up to listen to them. And of course there were the radio drama versions of Star Wars that NPR ran off and on. So when the TOS movies when come out on VHS, I would record the movies onto cassette tapes so I could take them with me on long trips. Loved it, probably still have some of those old tapes in a box somewhere.

 

[SchwEnt]

When I was a kid, before cable, before VCRs...

The best I could do was tape-recording re-runs by holding the recorder up to the TV speaker for an hour.

I had "Requiem for Methuselah" and "The Enterprise Incident" on cassettes tapes. I listened to them so much I got 'em burned into my brains now.

Audio-only, well, I can listen to TMP score and that gets me 76% of the experience.

 

[bbailey861]

I also taped all the original episodes and played them back repeatedly. I will still put an episode or movie on and lie down, close the eyes, and just listen.

 

[Gaith]

Never tried it, no... though I could see myself listening to the Plinkett TNG reviews without video. Just rewatched the FC review, and it's seriously great stuff.

 

[Lt. Cheka Wey]

When I was a kid, before cable, before VCRs...

The best I could do was tape-recording re-runs by holding the recorder up to the TV speaker for an hour.

I had "Requiem for Methuselah" and "The Enterprise Incident" on cassettes tapes. I listened to them so much I got 'em burned into my brains now.

Audio-only, well, I can listen to TMP score and that gets me 76% of the experience.

Do you use it when you can't sleep?

 

[Lenny Nurdbol]

Well, don't call me a get-a-life geek or anything, but...

Back during the Dark Times in the Early 1970s... Long before visual media like VCRs and all that... I spent my early years taping all of the episodes off the air with a hand-held audio cassette recorder so I could play them back over and over again... This got rather messy with all the syndication cuts, so I had multiple tapes for each episode from different stations... Clicking it on and off to bypass commerials and without the title seq and end credits I was typically able to fit 1 full episode on each side of a 90 minute tape... I labelled each with Title and Stardate using a label-maker gun... I still have them stashed away here, somewhere, though I dunno about their playback status...

Later on I taped TAS, I think fitting 4 episodes per tape or else I used shorter running time tapes... I used Red labels for TAS, Black for TOS... TAS was a real pain in the ass to tape since I missed their initial airings and had to wing it whenever cartoons randomly popped up...

And even then people thought I was...crazy...

 

[Melakon]

I audio taped several dozen TOS episodes through a cassette recorder's built-in mic, and the parakeet I had at the time would get vocal during the fast music parts, first chattering and then breaking into birdcalls. I had some corresponding Foto-Novels too, and the tapes and books came in handy when I worked a nightshift a mile inside a man-made cavern with no access to tv, radio, or even a window. You never knew what weather surprise was waiting in the morning.

 

[Lenny Nurdbol]

I collected all of those fotonovels... I remember getting just blown away by the first one I saw: "Where No Man Has Gone Before"... My mother got it for me when I was sick... Picked it up at that pharmacist office... Considering that this was years away from video tape, it was the next best thing to the actual episode, better than the Blish adaptation because the dialogue was Much closer to the script...