Received mine on Monday evening, great packaging/presentation as always with these reissues. My initial thoughts on the 5.1 remix are similar to last year's Fugazi release.
The front-to-rear seperation is really extreme, allowing you to hear all kinds of hidden details in the production. For instance - I never would have guessed that the intro to "No One Can" has two overlaid guitar parts, but they've now been split between the front and rear speakers. The rear speakers are used primarily for keys, backing vocals, and the occasional rhythm guitar part. H's vocals are not isolated in the center speaker like on the other albums, they're dispersed pretty evenly across all three front channels.
This would probably be my favorite mix in this series if not for the squashed dynamics. "Splintering Heart" starts out great, but as soon as the guitar kicks in around 2:35 it feels like someone jammed a lid on the whole thing. The choruses in "Dry Land" and "Cover My Eyes" used to really pop, but now it's like the volume barely changes from the preceding verse. I wonder what this sounded like before it was mastered?
