Tag: Audiophilia

  • Watching Music

    Maybe this is just a tangent from the cinephilia in a digital age post . . .

    I picked up two really interesting DVDs this week, Peter Gabriel’s Play and the deluxe edition of Beck’s Guero. Play is a comprehensive collection of Gabriel’s music videos, spanning all the way back to a clip for “Modern Love” from the first album. There are more than twenty videos in all, and, with only a few exceptions, all feature new multi-channel mixes from Daniel Lanois. Some are fairly subtle; others (“Shaking the Tree,” for example) are complete reimaginings of the songs.

    The deluxe Guero includes (if I recall correctly) four different mixes: stereo and 5.1 channel mixes, playable on all DVD players, and stereo and 5.1 high bit-rate mixes, playable only on DVD-Audio players. The standard DVD mixes are accompanied by abstract clips from video artist D-Fuse; the DVD-Audio mixes include still photos.

    Watching Play, I was struck by the consistency and determination with which Gabriel has pursued his career as a multi-media artist. He seems to have approached the making of each video as a genuine collaboration with visual artists, an attempt find something new in his music and in the video medium. Not every one of them is successful, of course, but all are interesting. Guero is something even more abstract. The videos are (as far as I can tell after one quick glance) free of narrative and in a kind of associative dialogue with the songs.

    Both discs are harbingers of things to come, though. I hope so, at least. We seem to be marching at a dizzying clip toward the fusion of media, and discs like Play and Guero offer us a taste of the media-gumbo that is likely to emerge. It’s fun to imagine what effect this might have on our visual literacy. Peter Gabriel brings artists like Robert LePage into our homes, and D-Fuse gives us art house abstraction. I need to think on this some more . . .

    Those multi-channel mixes are mind-blowers, by the way. Especially the DVD-Audio mix of Guero. I had no idea my home theater could sound like that.

  • Multi-Channel Goodness

    In the November 2004 issue of Stereophile, Kalman Rubinson offers a downright ecstatic review of BMG’s recent release on SACD of remasterings of 20 original RCA Living Stereo albums:

    I don’t have to tell you how prized and respected their recordings have been, from their first release on RSC vinyl half a century ago to their various incarnations on CD. . . . These recordings’ musical and audiophile significance are rivaled only by the contemporaneous Mercury Living Presence series, which themselves are due to be released soon as three-channel hybrid SACDs.

    Originally recorded in three channels then mixed down to two for stereo release, the Living Stereo series can now be heard at home the way it was intended — thanks to multi-channel SACD and center channel speakers. And, man, does it sound good. I picked up four of the titles last night at Border’s (as far as I know, only the first ten are currently available):

    Follow the links to see the full track listings. I’ve named only the first major piece on each recording, but, except for the Ravel (which is complete and runs nearly an hour) all include several other major works.

    I don’t talk about this much on Long Pauses — mostly out of embarrassment — but I’m a lifelong audiophile. After watching me spend hours twiddling with my dad’s five-foot long, cabinet-style record player, my parents bought me my own turntable when I was eight or nine. I got my first job when I was fifteen and used most of my earnings to buy a Technics component system: receiver, dual-deck tape player, then, just before my 16th birthday in 1988, a CD player. I upgraded the receiver several times in college, went Dolby Pro Logic, bought a center channel speaker and some surrounds, a hi-fi VCR, and in January 1998 bought a Toshiba SD-2107, the 2nd generation DVD player that is now in our bedroom. When we bought this house in the spring, I upgraded again, adding DVD-Audio and SACD, 7.1 sound, and, um, a projector.

    What can I say? Like I tell Joanna, I’m a man with few hobbies. I read, I watch movies, and I run. Oh, and I drive a 2000 Nissan Sentra. All things being equal, I’m a man of simple and inexpensive tastes. Except for the home theater stuff. Obviously.

    As Rubinson mentions often in his “Music in the Round” column, the explosion of home theater has been good and bad for audiophiles. The rapid developments in hardware technology and sound processing algorithms has put mid-fi sound well within reach of most budgets. But as TV monitors and projection screens — the new focal point of most systems — have grown and grown, our front speakers have moved further and further apart. And that does bad things to the fidelity of good two-channel music.

    That’s where the center channel speaker comes in. These new Living Stereo SACDs confirm what many have suspected for some time — that is, music sources recorded in three channels and played back on three matching, full-range speakers can sound very, very, very good.

    I only had an hour or so to play with the SACDs last night, and I don’t in any way claim expertise in the field of classical recordings. But, listening to the two pieces with which I am most familiar, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Debussy’s La Mer (included on the Saint-Saens disc), I actually laughed out loud. I don’t recall ever closing my eyes and being able to so clearly see an orchestra before me. When the muffled brass entered on Bartok’s Concerto — you know, the part that John Williams ripped off, like, a hundred times in Star Wars — I could point to the exact spot on the soundstage where they were standing. And because the recordings were made in the 1950s, they have life to them, they breathe. They aren’t the sterile, tightly compressed mixes that we get so often today.

    And best of all, for only $11.99 (or less, I’m sure) you get a multi-channel SACD track, a 3:2 SACD mixdown, and a 16/44.1 two-channel track. What the hell does that mean? It means that these “hybrid” SACDs will play on any CD or DVD player. You don’t need SACD, though without it you will be getting a smaller, more compressed bit stream, and you also won’t get the center channel. But if you’re looking to buy recordings of the standard repertoire and you hope to get into SACD eventually, these discs are (to some extent, at least) future-proof. And I can’t recommend them highly enough.