HiRez Poll Bowie, David - ZIGGY STARDUST [SACD]

[elguapo511]

hi,

I went to see phish in Las Vegas in Halloween this year. Not only do they play a different set each night, but on Halloween they cover a classic album from start to finish.

You don't know what album it will be until you walk in the door and an usher hands you the 'phishbill."

This years album was The Rise And Fall of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars.

Four piece horn section/background vocalist and string section.

I would not have been so prepared for the jams had it not been for reading this forum and getting into the surround sound.

Wham bam thank you mam.

 

[MrSmithers]

Classic album and I really enjoy listening to this SACD. To me it's the default version to listen to in MCH. It's much more pleasurable hearing this over the stereo version. And the sonics are great in DSD...

 

[Scott65]

A 7. Some good bits but could have been a lot better....

 

[ssully]

I only today realized that the LP+DVD version includes Scott's 2003 5.1 mixes of three bonus tracks.:
"Additional tracks: Moonage Daydream (Instrumental), The Supermen, Velvet Goldmine, Sweet Head as remixed by Ken Scott in 2003 in 5.1 48/24 DTS Surround and Dolby Digital Surround and 48/24 PCM Stereo. ...Those additional tracks mentioned were not issued at the time (on SACD) and are previously unreleased in this 5.1 form "

The hunt is on!

 

[ssully]

And FWIW, transfers of the early Bowie masters are supposedly now available in hi rez
"It is the first 13 original albums from Space Oddity to Heroes (without David Live) as direct copies from the original masters. "


http://www.davidbowieworld.nl/mijn-bootlegs-2-2/off-masters-albums-high-resolution/

 

[fredblue]

And FWIW, transfers of the early Bowie masters are supposedly now available in hi rez
"It is the first 13 original albums from Space Oddity to Heroes (without David Live) as direct copies from the original masters. "


http://www.davidbowieworld.nl/mijn-bootlegs-2-2/off-masters-albums-high-resolution/

supposed bin masters previously did the rounds as SACD-R (presuming these are the same boots) i'd imagine someone here or at the SHF might have some pointers. i heard some tracks from the SACD-R's at a friend's place years ago and they did sound great on their rig but i didn't ask for copies as i was enamoured of the RCA CDs at the time and didn't feel the twinge of upgradeitis i regrettably do now! ah well..

 

[ssully]

Purported to be digitizations of 1/4" R2R 'masters' . Who knows.

 

[fredblue]

Purported to be digitizations of 1/4" R2R 'masters' . Who knows.

no idea, i'll pm my friend with the sacd-r's in the morning. he's a big Bowie fan as well as being a major surround nut who knows his onions.

 

[ssully]

I meant, who knows what 'masters' means here? From comments it seems to be : commercially available R2Rs of Bowie albums, as sold in the 1970s. Which wouldn't mean the same as 1/4" studio masters, or flat transfers thereof.

In other words, like that 'High Definition Tape Transfers' outfit. (From which I've bought a couple or orchestral quad offerings. I still have no idea how legal they are.)

 

[fredblue]

I meant, who knows what 'masters' means here? From comments it seems to be : commercially available R2Rs of Bowie albums, as sold in the 1970s. Which wouldn't mean the same as 1/4" studio masters, or flat transfers thereof.

In other words, like that 'High Definition Tape Transfers' outfit. (From which I've bought a couple or orchestral quad offerings. I still have no idea how legal they are.)

oh right, i don't know what sources they're talking about.
if they mean they are taken from consumer reels, they're clearly not mastertapes.

heard varying reports on those HDTT things, some to the effect they were not strictly legit and others saying they were.. but again i don't know.

 

[H.A.L.]

I still wonder about that German 5.1 SACD of HUNKY DORY that I saw on fLeaBay . . . oh well, never seen the like again.

 

[fredblue]

had a brief play with some of the 5.1 tracks this morning (never bothered looking at what the mix was doing before for some reason, apathy i guess at what i was hearing years ago) and well.. what a weird use of the multitracks, its not a great surround mix really imho.
you've got beautiful bone dry Bowie vocals hard in the Centre channel at low volume (sometimes double tracked.. yummy) but with the same vocals in all channels and the Fronts louder than the Rears its all just ugh.. indistinct and front-heavy.
add insult to injury, when you take either pair and invert one of the Rears and sum them to mono, Bowie's vocals disappear and you get some gorgeous isolated elements, the same thing happens when you take the front pair whack
one channel out of phase and sum them.. which makes me think it was all there all along in the stems
and in doing the 5.1 a lot of that stuff was just lumped in with everything else plus a bit of reverb.. hmm.. i'll have a further fiddle tonight and report back if anything noteworthy crops up.

 

[fredblue]

ok quick update for anyone who's interested, fiddled about with the 5.1 of Starman for about half an hour.. it will need a lot of extra work to give everything polish and if i were to take things further i'd play around giving a bit of ambience, reverb etc its all rather raw and unvarnished, plus swapping stuff about and playing with phase trickery so much some bass oomph is lost on elements, drums mainly.. but curiously OOP tricks bring the actual bass playing to the fore which is scrummy, plus some vocals are brought up more in the mix and others disappear (!) i could sort of bring them back if i took the tracks and split them and inverted and summed them up again and dropped the results back in to the mix but i don't have time today. anyhoo... if anyone wants to hear a rough approximation of the direction i think could be taken with that track PM anytime and i'll send you a clip. cheers!

 

[fredblue]

oh crikey.. the 5.1 of "Hang On To Yourself" 'as is', is just plain.. yikes..!

rather than have Bowie's vocal isolated in the Centre, there's bass guitar solo'd in the Centre channel at lower volume than all but the LFE (and the LFE has low bass at low volume) and the Fronts are pretty loud (fair whack louder than the Rears) and clip like crazy.

when you extract all the various bits with phase cancellation etc., its remarkable how much is buried in that surround mix, including lead vocals, drum parts, harmony vocals, you name it!

again, if anyone wants to hear the results of my fiddling, PM anytime.
tbh this has motivated me to try and rejig the whole album. wish me luck!

i so wish 'they' would "just" hand it all over to Tony Visconti and/or Steven Wilson to remix everything in 5.1 because most of what we have from Bowie's catalogue in 5.1 is either rubbish or underwhelming imho.

 

[privateuniverse]

i so wish 'they' would "just" hand it all over to Tony Visconti and/or Steven Wilson to remix everything in 5.1 because most of what we have from Bowie's catalogue in 5.1 is either rubbish or underwhelming imho.

I would love that too. Unfortunately, the Bowie camp seems more interested in overpriced boxed sets that have no new content and 7" picture discs. It's criminal, especially when you consider how much unreleased audio & video are sitting in the vaults.

 

[ssully]

The 5.1 SACD mix sounds great to me as is; I really don't know what you guys are finding so lacking. It sounds very true to the original, beloved album, soundwise, with some added and appropriate surround fun, (like the echoes on 'Moonage Daydream'). I'm not having an issue with bass level either. Ken Scott's instincts sound, to me, correct and faithful to what he did back in the 70s. He, after all would know. And I certainly don't buy into the Steven Wilson cult.

Bass is always interesting to check in various surround editions. Lately I've been taking a deep dive into the *real* differences between the same mix, released in different formats-- finding to be posted in its own thread, eventually -- and I find that where there are differences between SACD, DVDA, DTS, etc, it's virtually always in the LFE. And it's due to different upper frequency cutoffs being used for LFE (for reasons not clear to me). For example, some LFEs have content all the way out to 300Hz. (some even further...!) Some don't. And this is for the same album, otherwise same mix. This means that your AVR's LFE range , i.e., its upper frequency setting (if it has one), is going to be a significant factor in what you hear. For example, if your LFE range is set to 300Hz, then your sub (or full range mains, if LFE is directed there) will be trying to output more 'upper bass' from one version than another. And in turn, whether your subwoofer can physically do this, is also a factor in play.

I hasten to add, this has nothing to do with audiophile mythology of the superiority of DSD vs PCM vs lossy. It is simply a factor in how much upper bass content is allowed in the LFE channel by the mix engineer, and your gear at home.

One thing I'm going to do is compare the DTS Ziggy to the SACD Ziggy .

 

[edisonbaggins]

The 5.1 SACD mix sounds great to me as is; I really don't know what you guys are finding so lacking. It sounds very true to the original, beloved album, soundwise, with some added surround fun. (Like echoes on 'Moonage Daydream'). I'm not having an issue with bass level either.

Good to know I'm not the only one. This is far from the best-sounding SACD I've ever heard, but easily an upgrade of any experience I've had with the album in stereo.
Have I had the best experience in stereo, e.g. best mastering, best resolution, etc.? Maybe not, but I've had the typical experience - CD, LP, radio and the SACD enhances my experience.

 

[fredblue]

having been underwhelmed by the 5.1 for the longest time, when i checked out the stems from the DVD today it gave me the beginnings of some clues as to maybe why the mix has divided the crowd so much over the years and possibly why i've never enjoyed it as much as i have say the EJ 5.1's, even though i love Bowie and the album as much as anything Elton did.. it's not the material, its the mix.

straight off the bat, i noticed the Front channels are overloud and clip on every track (in some instances they clip a lot).. then there's the LFE, on almost all songs it is really low in level.. lead vocals are mixed so that they are often everywhere all at once but at unusual (and to me unexpected in the context of listening to a lot of multichannel mixes over the years) levels in each channel, the Bowie vocals are often dry in the Centre but very muted and other elements are sometimes lumped in the Centre channel as well, especially bass guitar but on occasion other things that to me bear no relation to his voice and what he is doing with his voice (that maybe why the Centre channel is so dialled down in the mix? maybe the people behind this mix didn't know what to do with the Centre channel?).. sometimes lead vocals are reverbed in the Rears but often they are not and are given exactly the same treatment as those lead vocals mixed in the Front pair only in the Rears they're not overdriven to distortion.

obviously the man is an undeniable legend in his craft and i'm a total nobody but fwiw i'm not entirely convinced Ken Scott is the only man or indeed the best man for the surround job.

you'd definitely want him on board as the consultant or director of another go at a remix (if he'd even be up for that) but i just don't feel he made the most in achieving a spread of surround out of the layers available.

in Hang On To Yourself for example, there's several guitar parts going on but so much of its lumped into the Front pair in the released mix, it all just sits there a bit leaden and somewhat lacking in life, there's not a whole lot of excitement about the way things are mixed.
i'm also a little bit suspicious there might have been some upmixing going on for some of the 5.1 tracks (has that ever been discussed before?) but that's another thing altogether i won't go into right now.

oh and in Starman, there's lead vocals in the Rears throughout that are virtually as loud as they are in the Fronts, for me it just pulls you out of the mix.

such a masterwork of an album deserved a more inspired, more ambitious and more accomplished surround mix, in my very humble, layman's opinion. still a "6", sadly.

 

[ssully]

Well, that means the DVD 5.1 has been significantly remastered. The 5.1 SACD channels are definitely *not* overdriven or clipped. At all. Here's the whole album. Bravo Ken Scott.

 

[ssully]

As for actual mixing choices, what matters in the end is how the mix sounds in aggregate, not how Center 'should be used' or whatnot, and not what channels sound like in isolation or pairs. YMMV.