On my REG 2 Angel Season 4 DVD everyone's voices are slightly higher. This is especially noticable in Angel's voice, he ends up sounding like a pre-pubscent teen. I have a Philips 727 player. Is this a disc issue or a player issue and can it be remedied? Thanks for any input.

That's because PAL runs faster when displayed on NTSC equipment.

PAL is 25 frames per second, NTSC is 30. More PAL frames need to be displayed per second on NTSC equipment thus the speedup.

So is this something that everybody just gets used too then?

Yes, unless you can slow it down. It bothers me too.

There are ways to do that when you play your DVDs with a computer. Some software players allow you to slow down the speed on PAL DVDs.

It has nothing to do with converting the PAL to NTSC. PAL runs at 25 fps, which is 4% faster than the 24 fps of projected film. It always runs faster, whether you convert it to NTSC or not.

NTSC runs at approx. 30fps, but a complicated pulldown scheme is used to keep the playback at its original speed. PAL has no such pulldown process during the transfer.

Right! I don't know what I was thinking of.

I should have remembered it didn't really have anything to do with NTSC. I watch PAL and don't go through the conversion to NTSC and still have that problem.

I just think it's odd that nobody seems to mention it that often as a major problem.

Well, it's usually not that much of a problem, especially with dialog. Generally if it's a piece of music you know well, it will sound odd. I have watched Season 2 and Season 3 Angel UK DVD's on a CH 500 and a Toshiba SD 3900. The theme song was off, fairly tinny. But while the voices weren't 100% right on, they weren't as bad as you described. If someone has a deep voice, the voice should still be deep, just not as deep.