btw, PowerDVD-v4 reports disc-1 has a steady 1536Kbps LPCM-2.0 Audio.
What does the R2 or the R0 report as audio-levels?
edit:
Oh, yeah. Here's my take on ep1 of the R1.
First off, I don't have the R0 or the R2.
Ok. I'm listening to ep1 thru my headphones (a lowly sony mdr-v150) and I'm quite disappointed in the initial audio-quality. I'm not sure what the actual audio-quality of the other dvd-versions (R0/R2) are, but the audio-quality on this R1 in ep1 were indeed a bit crappy when using headphones. At least, with the audio in the first half of ep1.
It seems like there's a more pronounced bias to the left-side. The right-side is very low. The left-side has more clearer output.
A trailing left-echo was very evident when the camp-commandant was addressing the students, for example (around 7:47 to 7:58).
However, the bias seems to have disappeared a little bit around after the first eyecatch (12:44 onwards) and both sides seemed to have balanced out thru the remainder of the episode-1.
Fwiw, the changed bgm on Noriko's workout didn't really bother me. The original was fine, but the replacement theme was really not that bad. Of course, your mileage may vary.