I've been talking to sound houses about my DAT tapes and whether or not the defects I heard with headphones should send me back to the mix studio. As is usual, I got all sorts of confusing and sometimes contradictory information. Ultimately, no one can make such a judgment without hearing the tapes. The most articulate and helpful person I spoke to was a woman named Fran at Zounds, and I'm going to take the tapes in tomorrow and let her go over them.
The optical track that actually becomes the movie sound track has a much smaller frequency range than the digital media that I've been working with. It is of course sad that the final medium is so relatively crude, but that might work to my advantage, in that the unpleasant "noise floor" of the sound track might be too low-frequency to make it to the final print.
A possible problem is that we didn't take the reduced frequency range of the optical track into account when we were mixing. If important parts of our sound track are in the high or low ranges, the sound could be clipped by the DAT-to-film transfer. Fran is going to listen for this as well as for defects. I suspect that our unexceptional, low-tech sound track will squeeze onto film without much loss.
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