HiRez Poll Genesis - ABACAB [SACD]
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My first ever Genesis - and what a superb introduction!
The music is completely new to me, so I cannot compare this to any other version from the past, but it sounds excellent to these ears.
The mix makes excellent use of the rear speakers, indeed I'm dead chuffed with it!
Very highly recommended...
The music is completely new to me, so I cannot compare this to any other version from the past, but it sounds excellent to these ears.
The mix makes excellent use of the rear speakers, indeed I'm dead chuffed with it!
Very highly recommended...
Well I will be posting the same info. for each cd as I got the box 76-82(Sacd and NTSC) and as Trick and W & W were my favorite cd's/lp's from past they are still my favorite after these multi channels came out. I am not bothered by the compression used and am enjoying the extra details coming out in each sacd and after each listen. I think Nick Davis has done a good job on these mix's. I will give Abacab a score of 8(8 for music and 8 m/c mix).
I also enjoy the extra disk which has songs I had never heard before.
I would rate extra cd as 8 music and a 8 for m/c mix.
I also enjoy the extra disk which has songs I had never heard before.
I would rate extra cd as 8 music and a 8 for m/c mix.
Hey! some pretty cool and bold mixing decisions here. Who dunnit? I didn't I didn't do it, I...! Spectacular, Nick, you almost shocked me.
But shame that the drums sound somewhat flat instead of boomy. Ah well, it's all very nice still.
But shame that the drums sound somewhat flat instead of boomy. Ah well, it's all very nice still.
Good SACD. Like the songs, like the mix. And like the frequency balance better than And Then There Were Three; bass levels were spot on and the highs were not nearly as harsh. I'm also very happy with this one.
The song Abacab is one of my favorites of Genesis.
Give it an 8. Recommended!
The song Abacab is one of my favorites of Genesis.
Give it an 8. Recommended!
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kap'n krunch
2K Club - QQ Super Nova
a 6 because it's revisionist mix...
I WANTED THE GATED DRUMS!!!!!!
They could have offered it as an extra....
I WANTED THE GATED DRUMS!!!!!!
They could have offered it as an extra....
Wow. Just listening to it right now.
This is my favourite "new-era" SACD.
I like the punch and clarity of the mix, which is also not too bright as for others in this series.
I gave only 8 but would now change to 11
Definately the best band out there :banana:
This is my favourite "new-era" SACD.
I like the punch and clarity of the mix, which is also not too bright as for others in this series.
I gave only 8 but would now change to 11
Definately the best band out there :banana:
mam
Senior Member
I´ve heard it in last week. It was not my first session with this album. I am very very happy about the clarity, the ultra deep punch and all the sounds which are flying around me. I don`t know how it can be made better. So I give it a 10.
I originally gave this disc an '8', and that seems to be the same thing I would vote it today.
First off, one of my favorite thing about this album is the drum sound, especially on this remix. Very powerful indeed!
The surround mix on the title track is really not that flashy, but it works overall. Occasionally I would bring up some of the surround effects a little more.
"No Reply At All" features the Earth Wind & Fire horn section mostly in the surrounds along with the hand claps.
Another great thing about most of Nick Davis' Genesis surround mixes is how forward the vocal is. You can always clearly hear it with everything else going on.
"Me & Sarah Jane" is a great showcase for Tony Banks' keyboards and occasionally you'll get some good backing vocals in the surrounds as well.
"Keep It Dark" is not much of a surround song in the verses, but thankfully the choruses open up a little bit, and the breakdowns are great for surround before going back to being a mostly front-based song.
"Dodo/Lurker" is definitely one of my favorite songs on the album, and it has a surround mix that goes between very subtle to having a lot more flashy moments.
Then…"Who Dunnit?"…what can one say except that this is known as the worst Genesis song ever, and it lives up to that reputation for sure! It is a very flashy surround mix though, so there is that plus.
Thankfully the quality songs picks up after that with "Man on the Corner", a great solo track from Phil. More surround handclaps on this one. This is followed by "Like It Or Not", a pleasant track from Mike Rutherford that doesn't really offer that much in terms of surround.
Then the whole album finishes up with "Another Record" (but that's all for tonight)
First off, one of my favorite thing about this album is the drum sound, especially on this remix. Very powerful indeed!
The surround mix on the title track is really not that flashy, but it works overall. Occasionally I would bring up some of the surround effects a little more.
"No Reply At All" features the Earth Wind & Fire horn section mostly in the surrounds along with the hand claps.
Another great thing about most of Nick Davis' Genesis surround mixes is how forward the vocal is. You can always clearly hear it with everything else going on.
"Me & Sarah Jane" is a great showcase for Tony Banks' keyboards and occasionally you'll get some good backing vocals in the surrounds as well.
"Keep It Dark" is not much of a surround song in the verses, but thankfully the choruses open up a little bit, and the breakdowns are great for surround before going back to being a mostly front-based song.
"Dodo/Lurker" is definitely one of my favorite songs on the album, and it has a surround mix that goes between very subtle to having a lot more flashy moments.
Then…"Who Dunnit?"…what can one say except that this is known as the worst Genesis song ever, and it lives up to that reputation for sure! It is a very flashy surround mix though, so there is that plus.
Thankfully the quality songs picks up after that with "Man on the Corner", a great solo track from Phil. More surround handclaps on this one. This is followed by "Like It Or Not", a pleasant track from Mike Rutherford that doesn't really offer that much in terms of surround.
Then the whole album finishes up with "Another Record" (but that's all for tonight)
hwkn
1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
I gave it a 9 originally.........after listening to it again today i'd up it to a 10[on sacd btw]
I find the mix that Nick Davis did for this one pretty similar to how he mixed Duke. Duke is a somewhat denser record in places though so I think this one breathes a bit more. As with Duke, a lot of elements that are in the rears are doubled in the fronts. It's a pleasing approach. No wildly discrete, but an enjoyable listen. RT's review above gives a pretty good rundown of each song's mix so I won't reiterate. I will mention that "Me and Sarah Jane" was a highlight for me, a nice immersive mix and "Who Dunnit" gets pretty aggressive with the mix, which is appropriate as it's one of Genesis's most wacky songs.
As for the music, I bought this album the day it was released. I had been eagerly awaiting the followup to Duke, an album that I really loved. It was hard not to feel a bit let down by this one. They clearly wanted to shake things up here. And maybe at the time it was just the shock of the new direction that left me a bit cold. Listening to it now I find that it holds up pretty well. It's certainly not the equal of their 70's material, however for 80's mainstream rock, it's pretty solid. A lot better than much of what was on rock radio at the time. Two songs here get heavily maligned by fans. First, "Who Dunnit" is pretty out there, but I like it. It's a goofy little novelty song and it's pretty fun. (They were initially reluctant to put it on the album but their record company president convinced them to do it.) The other is "No Reply At All". People freaked because there were horns on a Genesis record. Well for starters, it's the Earth Wind & Fire horns who are quite awesome. Secondly, if you strip away the horns, the song is very similar to the title track of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. I always found it to be a good little pop-rock record, and the middle 8 is really beautiful. The rest of the material is pretty pleasing AOR, maybe not anything exceptional (although "Dodo/Lurker" is pretty cool) but an enjoyable listen.
In terms of fidelity, I prefer this one over Duke or ...And Then There Were Three. The arrangements are a bit sparser than the two previous albums so it feels a bit more open. This one doesn't have the harshness that some of the other Genesis titles do.
Very good, but not great selection of songs. Mix also very good but not exceptional (most of the Gabriel era titles have superior mixes.) So I will go with an 8. .
Put another record on......
As for the music, I bought this album the day it was released. I had been eagerly awaiting the followup to Duke, an album that I really loved. It was hard not to feel a bit let down by this one. They clearly wanted to shake things up here. And maybe at the time it was just the shock of the new direction that left me a bit cold. Listening to it now I find that it holds up pretty well. It's certainly not the equal of their 70's material, however for 80's mainstream rock, it's pretty solid. A lot better than much of what was on rock radio at the time. Two songs here get heavily maligned by fans. First, "Who Dunnit" is pretty out there, but I like it. It's a goofy little novelty song and it's pretty fun. (They were initially reluctant to put it on the album but their record company president convinced them to do it.) The other is "No Reply At All". People freaked because there were horns on a Genesis record. Well for starters, it's the Earth Wind & Fire horns who are quite awesome. Secondly, if you strip away the horns, the song is very similar to the title track of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. I always found it to be a good little pop-rock record, and the middle 8 is really beautiful. The rest of the material is pretty pleasing AOR, maybe not anything exceptional (although "Dodo/Lurker" is pretty cool) but an enjoyable listen.
In terms of fidelity, I prefer this one over Duke or ...And Then There Were Three. The arrangements are a bit sparser than the two previous albums so it feels a bit more open. This one doesn't have the harshness that some of the other Genesis titles do.
Very good, but not great selection of songs. Mix also very good but not exceptional (most of the Gabriel era titles have superior mixes.) So I will go with an 8. .
Put another record on......
All right - I'm not gonna make any excuses for this one. Side one isn't too bad, side two - not so much. I don't mind the hits, but the prog is pretty much gone - and this sold twice as much as Duke, so they weren't gonna go back. Ever. I'm giving the 5.1 an 8. It's slightly better than Duke, but not much.
What does this mean?
JediJoker
Audio Engineer/Enthusiast
"Gated drums" or "gated reverb" refers to a technique of recording and mixing drums to produce a very specific sound. You may not know it by name, but you'll know it by sound.
It was stumbled upon by accident while engineer Hugh Padgham was recording Phil Collins on drums for Peter Gabriel's third (self-titled) album. The recording console he was using, made by Solid State Logic (SSL), included not only a "talkback" facility to allow the engineer/producer to address musicians, but also a "listen" facility to allow the musicians to address the engineer/producer more easily and clearly. To accomplish this, the listen mic circuit included both an inline noise gate—which only allows sound above a certain threshold level to pass through the circuit—and harsh compressor. This makes sense when all you want to hear from the listen mic is musicians talking, and you want to hear them clearly: none of the low level studio noise gets passed to the engineer's/producer's monitor speakers/headphones, while the speech is kept a consistent volume level.
A listen mic had been set up in the drum room so Phil could talk to Hugh, but Hugh noticed that it also did some interesting things to the sound of the drums while Phil was playing. Because the listen mic was set up relatively far away from the drum kit, it picked up plenty of room sound—i.e., reverb—when active, and the compressor made the reverb almost as loud as the actual drum hits. But thanks to the noise gate, as soon as the level of the reverb tail dropped below the threshold, it would disappear into nothing. The effect is that the drums have this massive reverb sound that lasts only a fraction of a second after the hits. Up until this time, no engineer would have considered using such a setup to record drums or any other musical content, but Hugh thought it sounded interesting and patched the console so that he could record the listen mic channel to tape. The result:
Hugh and Phil continued to use this technique and sound throughout the '80s, and pretty soon, others were using it, too. It became the drum sound of the decade. It was very prominent on the original mix of Abacab, but dialed back somewhat on Nick Davis' 2007 remix.
Colin London
Well-known Member
Yes Great All their Recordings done into SACD & DTS 5.1
Phils Drums with Reverb, are great
Love the first track.
Phils Drums with Reverb, are great
Love the first track.
A bit disappointed with this one. I actually think the mix is ok, EXCEPT for the first two tracks Abacab and No Reply At All, which are arguably the tracks where you want to make the biggest splash. Abacab almost sounds like the first surround mix they ever did with Genesis and they were overly cautious. I'm not sure if they were limited by the source tracks, but I have to assume they weren't due to most of the rest of the album being decent. There just isn't much going on in the rears. Some backing vocals and doubled keys and not much else. No Reply At All they seem to have put some of the horns, but made a poor mixing decision to put the claps in the rears. The claps are distracting that way and should have really been left out in front or, if relegated to the back, turned down and part of more action in the rears.
Anyway, screwing up the first two songs kind of soured me on this release. To me, this is the last album that still sounds a bit like the old Genesis and-- a few songs aside-- is still a pretty solid album.
8/10. The rest of the album is a decent surround experience.
Anyway, screwing up the first two songs kind of soured me on this release. To me, this is the last album that still sounds a bit like the old Genesis and-- a few songs aside-- is still a pretty solid album.
8/10. The rest of the album is a decent surround experience.
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