One of the biggest fixes was to the audio for The Fellowship of the Ring. Mike Brunsmann at Warner Brothers DVD/BD Production contacted me that they had found a discrepancy in the audio for The Fellowship of the Ring. Whereas The Two Towers and The Return of the King were EX encoded, Fellowship was just 5.1 with no EX encoding at all. That told me something was wrong, because all three films had been originally encoded in EX. That needed to be corrected. It also made me recall that the mix itself for the DVD of FOTR was problematic and inconsistent with the audio for the DVDs of TTT and ROTK.
What had happened was, back in 2002, the group that was doing the encoding for Fellowship actually remixed the film from its original stems and created a new near-field mix, but not a Peter Jackson-approved mix. The audio track was also flattened out and it was kicked up a few decibels compared to the other two films. This accounts for the excessive bass that some consumers noted on the original, release of FOTR. Chris Boyes, one of the original mixers from the film itself, was brought in at the 11th hour to try and fix it, but at that point, he had to pick his battles and there was only so much he could correct. Because of this, the films mixing team was placed in charge of TTT and ROTK on DVD, so this issue did not recur on those discs, nor on any of the Extended Editions.
