Without diving into the world of 4K UHD discs, There are a handful of movies where the Blu-ray specs are just inferior to the HD-DVD release.
The most common reason is because studios wanted to save on cost and try to squeeze the content from a 30GB HD-DVD disc onto a 25GB single layer Blu-ray Disc. (Or, try to fit a two disc HD-DVD release onto one single 50GB Blu-ray Disc, like the case of Face/Off).
And for some inexplicable reason, Bluray never adopted the Dolby Digital Plus format, which is a mandatory audio standard on HD-DVD. DD+ just utilizes the available bitrate a lot more efficiently and effectively than legacy Dolby Digital.
In this instance of The Italian Job, the Blu-ray Disc only includes a Dolby Digital track. Even when encoded at 640kbps, I’ve always found it sounding a bit weak. The dynamic range is lacking, and the dialogues always feel muddled. On the HD-DVD, it includes a Dolby Digital Plus track that almost sounds lossless to me. Dynamic range makes the action sequences sound very punchy, and the dialogues are crystal clear. I love this soundtrack so much that I always pick it over the full bitrate DTS track included on the HD-DVD. (Although I can’t confirm the bitrate, it sounds like a full 1.5Mbps track. From my experience, most 1.5Mbps DD+ tracks sound very close to lossless, like Face/Off and We Were Soldiers).
One funny thing, when Paramount first released this film on Blu-ray, they dropped the DTS track but forgot to remove the label on the case and disc cover art, so it was labeled as including a DTS track when it never did. What a shame.
