I'll write more about it, but yes, The Dark Knight DVD is awful, quality-wise, and I'm sure this was done on purpose. There's no excuse for a film released in 2008 to have this sort of transfer, and the sound is indeed very peculiar. In fact, when the swirling smoke and the Batman logo came up at the beginning, there was almost NO sound at all and I thought there was something wrong, so I went to the audio page to make sure there wasn't some weird setup thing - there wasn't.