oakey wrote: ↑Sat 01 May 2021, 11:42 am
Watching Discovery now. I guess it's great that Parlophone still release items like this, but I would say it's for diehard fans only.
Some comments (watched it on a 65" OLED TV with Denon 5.1 amplifier, JBL speakers and Sony 4K UHD player):
- picture quality is poor; only close ups of Neil look sharpish, the rest is muddy VHS-like unsharp, ie all the full stage shots.
- The colours are oversaturated (especially blue and red, of which there are a lot because of the stage lighting)
- The soundtrack is not great either; it would have benefited from a remix. A 5.1 mix would have been nice, but it's not just the PCM stereo aspect that is a bit of a let down. Neil's vocals are (again) way too low in the mix. It's not ad bad as with the Savoy Somewhere DVD but I must say it is only marginally better. Sounds like Neil's vocals are recorded from the audience, including a bit of echo, rather than directly from his microphone. Makes it sound a bit like audience recorded YT movies
- The digipack packaging is of the kind where the discs are difficult to get out without firmly touching the data side of the disc.
- The CDs seem to sound a bit clearer than the DVD soundtrack, with slightly better audible vocals, but that may also be a false impression because of the lack of visuals (in theory PCM has a slightly higher bitrate than CD audio but doubt this would be audible)
One comment was made regarding a 5.1 mix ("maybe it wasn't recorded in 5.1"). Of course nothing is recorded in surround sound, that is done at the mixing stage. But maybe the original multitracks have vanished and they only have the mastertapes of the stereo mix available. Or a remix would have been to costly.
All in all a fine release but don't think I will watch it very often (or play the CDs).
It's a pity that from the early 80s to the late 90s analogue video was "the thing", seen as an improvement over costly 16mm or 32mm film. Because of that we ended up with poor concert videos from that period as most were recorded on analogue video for the home video market (never with the intention to exceed the then-current TV specs), while film-recorded live shows from the 70s look perfect on current HD or even 4K TVs because of the much higher resolution than the PAL or NTSC specs from analogue video.
(Just check out Supertramp live in Paris from the 70s on bluray or INXS Live Baby Live from early 90s -an exception- on 4K UHD)
Because of that, no HD concert videos exist of David Bowie. Such a shame...