Customer Reviews

Holding Up Half the Sky

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Anyone who has a flare for celtic music that is captivating and moving at once, this is the CD for you! It's so beautiful, I can sit listening to it for hours and not get tired of it. I've not been a fan of Celtic music for too long, but the music that I have heard on this CD and others has me hooked. This CD provoked a strange look from my uncle, but I find it to be absolutely worth listening to!

I'm a lover of Celtic music, especially female vocals, so this appeared to be a wonderful CD to hear many different artists, both famous and lesser known. I was familiar with some of the tracks, having heard them before (this is a compilation of earlier recordings), and thought that I'd really enjoy this CD.

The sad news is that this might be the very WORST mastering of any CD in the world. Compression? Oh, yeah - the dynamic range on this thing might stretch up to 2dB or so. EQ'ed to be ear-shatteringly bright and nasty? You got it! Processed to the Nth degree? Yup - this is the Velveeta of recordings. "Holding Up Half the Sky" is the embodiment of digital nastiness; were I teaching a class in mastering, it would be my demo disc for instructing students what not to do.

The unique and beautiful voices of the singers and the instrumentation of the musicians has been mashed and mangled beyond belief. Good recordings should sound unique, each different to the other, even tracks recorded in the same session. The mastering engineers here made every track on this CD sound virtually undistinguishable from every other one. All the subtlety and beauty of the music has been destroyed.

If you love music, avoid this piece of dreck like the plague. On second thought, the plague just might be preferable. It's truly sad that Shanachie committed this crime against music.

We heard "Rambling Irishman" on the radio in Ireland while on our honeymoon. We fell in love with that version of the song and found it on this album along with a bunch of other goodies!