I think astounding might be the word I have to go with here. There were a few times where I had to remind myself that these are quadraphonic mixes and not 6-channel. I found myself looking over at the sub a few times expecting to see the light on, like when listening to 'Cotton Mouth' on Toulouse Street. The detail and the bass response was incredible on that one, to my ears. Same thing with the impression of phantom center in many of the tunes. I honestly feel that the surround mixing here outperforms many, many 5.1s that I've heard. If the vast majority of surround mixes were this good, I think we'd be living in an ideal surround world.
Some standout mixes for me were: 'Cotton Mouth', 'Black Water', 'South City Midnight Lady', 'Another Park, Another Sunday', 'I Cheat The Hangman' and 'Rockin' Down The Highway'. I know there's definitely a correlation between how much you love certain albums/songs, and how you view surround mixes of those albums/songs - it's very hard to be objective about it. I just felt that there were so many different cool things going on surround-wise within many of the songs, that I just can't think of any where I thought, 'well, they definitely could've handled that one better'. A couple that really got my attention were 'South City Midnight Lady' and 'Another Park, Another Sunday', in that it seemed like during roughly the last minute of each song, the effect of the surround mix seemed to intensify somehow and I'd sit forward in my chair and think, holy shit! And I know that as I give these another run-through, there'll be other things I'll notice as well. I'm looking forward to it. To give this anything less than a 10 would just be a matter of being willfully disagreeable, the way I see it... so it's a 10.
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