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38 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great fidelity improvement, shame about the mix, November 16, 2001
Well, after getting my copy of this album in the mail today, I just spent the afternoon comparing the original CD with this DTS album.On the good side... The fidelity of sound achieved by moving to the higher 24bit/48-96KHz that DTS provides, compared to the 16bit/44.1KHz that CD is limited to, is remarkable (although, as an aside, the notes say that this album was first mixed in 20bits, making me wondering if a) it was left at that resolution or b) it was 'upsampled' to 24bits for DTS. I'd bet on the latter). The net result is much more analog sounding that the previous album, and when I say 'analog', I'm referring to the kind of source fidelity one usually only gets with a mega-kilobuck turntable coupled with an equally expensive cartridge and tone-arm (the kind of system I don't own, but have been lucky enough to hear). While the older CD was hardly the worst CD out there, it definitely suffered from 'digitis', notable in particular when Sting would hit high falsetto notes. One need only compare the high-pitched wails in 'Roxanne' to hear the difference. On the original CD, Sting's voice voice would exhibit a strange brittleness that would quickly cause listening fatigue, unless listened to very softly. In comparison, the new DTS sounds much more natural. While the Sting's voice, at times, still screeches just as high as it should, gone are the nasty high-frequency artifacts that make the old album such a (literal) pain to listen to. At the same time, the dynamic range has been expanded. Whether this is due to the lowered noise floor, as the increased number of bits would allow, or simply more skillful mastering, is hard to know. What is apparent is that the album sounds much less compressed, with the leading edges of drum attacks, in particular, sounding much more impactful. Along with the increased dynamics comes an increased sense of volume and space, as if more of the acoustic clues and ambient air noise of the original recording studios had been captured. While welcome and pleasant, this is particularly puzzling as it is almost certain that these songs were almost certainly not recorded using a purist miking method (such as two stereo cardioids), but instead multi-miked and multi-tracked. Which leads us into the mix. On the positive side, the LFE channel is well-blended and balanced, allowing for judicious subwoofer use, unlike some other DTS albums. Bass frequencies, for the most part, come out well-balanced. Sting's bass, especially on 'Every Breath You Take' and 'Wrapped Around Your Finger' is tight, rhythmic, and distinct, with no icky bass boost emphasis added. Now, on the negative side... I use a set of fully-matched speakers in my 5.1 setup. All of the speakers are timbrally matched, and have been calibrated to within +/- 1 dB of each other at the listening position using pink noise and SPL A-weighted measurements. When a 5.1 recording is well mixed (and there are very few of these), the speakers effectively disappear. Unfortunately for the current state of 5.1 sound (I imagine the engineers are still learning), this rarely happens. In contrast, the 'disappearing speaker effect' happens very reliably and consistently on even halfway decent 2-channel recordings. Imaging is one area where the original CD is definitely superior. For all the harshness of the original CD, it is definitely superior to the 5.1 recording when it comes to making the speakers disappear and create an image of the musicians floating in space. Ironically, considering it has more channels, the 5.1 recording sounds spatially flat when compared to the 2 channel CD. The exception to this is when the rear channels are used for some gimmicky effects, in which case it doesn't sound spatially flat, but just weird. I became so bothered by this at one point that I disabled my rear speakers and just listened to the 3 front channels. However, even using a front only setup (LCR + subwoofer), the 5.1 recording has less of a sense of space than the original CD. Not even once, using the DTS version, did I have the illusion that the musicians were singing invisibly from a point in space somewhere behind the plane of my speakers. So, in summary, I give the quality of sound on the new DTS disc 5 stars. It is definitely much smoother, more natural sounding, dynamic, and listenable than the original album. On the other hand, I give the 5.1 mix itself 3 stars, averaging out to 4 stars. The album is definitely worth buying, but until recording engineers learn how to mix 5.1 channels in a way that provides superior imaging, I wish they would include a DTS 2-channel track on the disc, as some multichannel SACD discs are beginning to do.
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