HiRez Poll Tears for Fears - SONGS FROM THE BIG CHAIR [DVD-A/BluRay Audio]

[byrdman7]

This is the first Steven Wilson disc I did not care for due to the way the vocals were mixed. If you own the Mercedes Benz dts DVD compare the mixes of "Shout", the vocals are present as they should be on the Mercedes disc. As much as I hate too, I rate this a 7.

 

[Franklin]

So I've played this in full now, but it was not exciting for me. There were no major issues for me at all, and I'm not sure why I was so unmoved by it. I didn't dislike it, and I'm familiar enough with the album, but it seemed too safe, too identical. Maybe the approach of replicating the mix in stereo and then using that balance brought nothing of interest new to the table. Maybe it's the sound of the stereo mix before it was expanded that doesn't lend itself so well for me. There's nothing hideously wrong for my tastes - I've heard other stuff I've really not enjoyed - but I don't recall anything on this mix grabbing me by the ears and saying YES! this is it; it was just fine. I was really excited about the 5.1 but have been surprised that other bonus stuff in the box set is exciting me far more. (Would have been nice the get The Way You Are as a 5.1 mix - especially one that was structured like the 12" version.)

 

[0tto]

i'll base not on the musical genre or likes/dislikes particular artists/albums. just on tech.side of this release.
SW approach to surround mix on this album isn't as much bold and adventurous as, let's say, on his own stuff.
doesn't mean this is poor mix, just, if that's can be said, solidly-safe and definitely an improvement over
original stereo (which can be compared to as it been included in release).
in regard of sound fidelity, sadly (and i mentioned somewhere that i do not expect much) 96/24 technology wouldn't
help to improve something, recorded back in time on first generation of digital gears. all these synth and samplings on
which mainly based recording, have their impact as well. but this apply almost entirely to 80th decade and new wave genre,
so one with sensitive ears should expect such drawback, when considering to purchase reissues from this time span.
overal: not the greatest astonishment achieved but rather solidly and highly professionally done work from what was available to work with.
8 from me.


b.t.w. in regard of reported vox issues. i don't have such, albeit in some certain moments on the track "Mothers Talk" voice
is somewhat buried in the music and not as clean as on other tracks.

 

[wavelength]

So I've played this in full now, but it was not exciting for me. There were no major issues for me at all, and I'm not sure why I was so unmoved by it. I didn't dislike it, and I'm familiar enough with the album, but it seemed too safe, too identical. Maybe the approach of replicating the mix in stereo and then using that balance brought nothing of interest new to the table. Maybe it's the sound of the stereo mix before it was expanded that doesn't lend itself so well for me. There's nothing hideously wrong for my tastes - I've heard other stuff I've really not enjoyed - but I don't recall anything on this mix grabbing me by the ears and saying YES! this is it; it was just fine. I was really excited about the 5.1 but have been surprised that other bonus stuff in the box set is exciting me far more. (Would have been nice the get The Way You Are as a 5.1 mix - especially one that was structured like the 12" version.)

This pretty much sums up my feelings about this disc. I just don't find myself going back to play this one very often. Fidelity is good. Mix is good. But the music is a bit boring to me. I think the thing that bothers me the most is that the vocalists(s) don't stand out for me. If I'm going to listen to an album that has vocals, and let's face it most do, then I want to be hooked by the singer. For my tastes these 2 guys aren't unique or powerful enough for me to want to listen to them. Like I said - that just how they sound to me - ymmv.

 

[rusinurbe]

well a copy of this finally found its way into my rotation, its certainly not an album I would normally buy, '80's Pop' (what an awefull decade for music). anyway it arrived and its a surprise how much of the album I like and the mix is up there with the best of the Wilson mixes.

The 8-0s Pop tag seems a bit inappropriate as well the album is much deeper than I gave the band credit for sure it has 'shout', 'head over heals' and 'everybody ..' but the other tracks are pretty strong as well.

Glad I bought pile .

 

[ar surround]

First thing that I like about this 5.1 BluRay Audio: You just pop in the disc, wait a few seconds, and it starts playing the music in 5.1. No having to turn on the TV and view endless notices and navigate through menus.

Also, I really love the mix on Everybody Wants to Rule the World. SW's mix has a lot more impact. It's the same effect as listening to his mix of Cross Eyed Mary on Aqualung...Really makes me smile.

 

[Clint Eastwood]

First thing that I like about this 5.1 BluRay Audio: You just pop in the disc, wait a few seconds, and it starts playing the music in 5.1. No having to turn on the TV and view endless notices and navigate through menus.

Also, I really love the mix on Everybody Wants to Rule the World. SW's mix has a lot more impact. It's the same effect as listening to his mix of Cross Eyed Mary on Aqualung...Really makes me smile.

For me that's the signature song and you are spot on about the sound...very open..I never thought about that comparison from aqualung...I have to give it a spin and check it out...

 

[ar surround]

For me that's the signature song and you are spot on about the sound...very open..I never thought about that comparison from aqualung...I have to give it a spin and check it out...

With both songs, Everybody Wants to Rule the World and Cross Eyed Mary, I went back and listened to the CD versions to confirm that they lack the dynamics and bass when compared to SW's 5.1 mixes; more so with Cross Eyed Mary. And the improvement comes more from the new mix rather than simply the hi-res BR-A format. Absolutely fantastic. In my opinion, Steven Wilson single handedly saved the surround-sound genre, at least with regard to non-classical music. That is something the Grammy people, as no surprise to many of us, don't seem to acknowledge. But I digress.

 

[elshagon]

Listened to this twice and the vocals are BURIED (except in the upmixes) ..am I doing something wrong?

I'm starting to believe this is the case as well on some songs it's more noticeable than others. I just went and raised the center channel +3.9 db's on Everybody Wants To Rule The World and it sounds much better to me now. In the computer room I could live with the original mix as I sit close to the center channel and although the vocals were lower than ideal it didn't bother me. In the car it's much harder to hear the vocals and without the added boost to the center channel it didn't sound quite right. It's an easy fix on tracks where the vocals live mainly in the center channel.

 

[DocCasualty]

Have had a few chances to listen to it now and it just keeps sounding better. Interestingly we were redecorating today and I put this on. Most of the time when I listen to a surround mix I'm sitting at the MLP but today I was moving around the room and really got an appreciation for how all channels were used in this. "10" from me.

 

[steelydave]

I had a listen to this for the first time today and I'm not ready to vote yet, but I wanted to throw out a couple of comments about the issues people seem to be experiencing with the disc...

1) Shout sounds 'bad' or 'worse than the rest of the album'. I think the problem here is the drum machine that dominates this track. Technological limitations meant that early drum machines like this one used really poor quality samples - the one used on this track doesn't sound like it's much more than 8 bit. As a result, all the percussion sounds very brittle and grainy, especially in the top end. I think this harshness is also exacerbated by the gating and/or compression used on the rhythm track to give it that big punchy sound. If you listen to the vocals and other instruments on this track they sound just fine, or at least as good as the rest of the album.

2) The Vocals are buried. I felt this way too, that they were at least a few dB too low, so I took a few of the 5.1 tracks in to Nuendo along with the original stereo mix as well as the stereo remix determined to find that there was a problem, but to my surprise, there wasn't - the levels between the 5 full range channels are almost exactly balanced. When you downmix the 5.1 to stereo, it sounds almost exactly like the stereo remix, which sounds pretty much like the original stereo mix. So what is going on then? There is what I would call a 'presence problem'. 'Presence' in audio is the area roughly between 2kHz and 8kHz, and when you boost the frequencies in this region, it makes whatever vocal or instrument you've applied that boost to seem more dominant, or 'present', even if technically the overall level of that track in the mix isn't any higher than any other track. Looking at the 5.1 mix in a spectrum analyser, I noticed that a lot of the activity in the rear speakers was boosted (either on purpose or just because thats what it naturally sounded like) in the presence band. As a result I think some of this stuff overwhelms the vocals, which are arrayed across the front three speakers. For example on track 2 'The Working Hour', the keyboards are mixed so that the low and low-mid frequencies are in the front speakers, and the middle (presence!) and high frequencies are in the rear, and the guitars (which are all in the 'presence' band are entirely in the rear. When all of this really gets going the vocals seem to get obscured as a result, especially if you're sitting anywhere near the rear speakers. This is probably exacerbated a bit by consumer grade home theatre speakers, which are a big more forgiving in the midrange area (ie they have a natural mild 'happy face' reproduction curve, accentuating treble and bass) compared to studio monitors which expose every little wart, especially in the midrange.

Here are a couple of spectral analysis plots that illustrate what I'm talking about - first is one from a random point in 'The Working Hour' - the green plot represents the front channels, and the pink plot represents the rear channels. Notice how much the rear channels are poking through between 1kHz and 4.5kHz, the heart of the 'presence' area:



Now compare that with Steven's 5.1 mix of 'The Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead' from XTC's Nonsuch - it was the closest in age/style to TFF of Steven's mixes I could think of. Notice that the rear channels don't overwhelm the fronts at all, especially in the presence band:



When you're doing a stereo mix you have to carefully 'carve out' space for each instrument and voice to sit in the sound field using EQ, so nothing obscures anything else. With a 5.1 mix you have so much more space to work with, so you don't need to worry about things being obscured - in fact it's almost the opposite, you need to worry more that everything stays glued together. The fact that 5.1 downmixes to match the stereo mix so perfectly makes me think that Steven was almost 'too faithful' to the original stereo mix in doing this mix and that maybe a little more outside the box thinking may have perfected it. I'll have to give the disc a few more listens before I come to any definitive conclusions, but this is how I'm feeling at the moment.

 

[rtbluray]

Steelydave, when you created a Downmix of the 5.1 mix, did you drop the center by 3dB in comparison to the other channels (which is the Downmix standard) or were all channels at equal level in the Downmix?

 

[steelydave]

They were at equal power - I was just doing it on the fly in Nuendo and listening to the results on headphones. I made separate stereo group channels for the 5.1 downmix and the two other stereo mixes so I could toggle between them.

 

[Cibola]

2) The Vocals are buried. I felt this way too, that they were at least a few dB too low, so I took a few of the 5.1 tracks in to Nuendo along with the original stereo mix as well as the stereo remix determined to find that there was a problem, but to my surprise, there wasn't - the levels between the 5 full range channels are almost exactly balanced. When you downmix the 5.1 to stereo, it sounds almost exactly like the stereo remix, which sounds pretty much like the original stereo mix. So what is going on then? There is what I would call a 'presence problem'.

Just finished listening to this straight through while thinking about you're observations. I had no expectations for it because I never heard the whole thing in any format. My initial impression was not of the vocals being "buried" at all. On many tracks the center channel has the vocal only with an almost ambient FR and FL effect. I used Audyssey recently after receiving my sub but always listen in Direct mode because it sounds better to me. I noticed that it sounds fuller (more spacious?) when listening to the DTS-HD MA stream as opposed to the 5.1 PCM.

 

[Clint Eastwood]

Just finished listening to this straight through while thinking about you're observations. I had no expectations for it because I never heard the whole thing in any format. My initial impression was not of the vocals being "buried" at all. On many tracks the center channel has the vocal only with an almost ambient FR and FL effect. I used Audyssey recently after receiving my sub but always listen in Direct mode because it sounds better to me. I noticed that it sounds fuller (more spacious?) when listening to the DTS-HD MA stream as opposed to the 5.1 PCM.

It's a mystery to me why some feel the vocals are buried.... I never experienced that...I would say it's system specific...probably has to do with some using the AVR software programs like I did with audyssey...

 

[steelydave]

I don't think the vocals are buried to the point of being inaudible, at least not on my system. They're just not quite as prominent as you'd like - for me turning down the rear speakers between 3-4dB results in a much more balanced/pleasant listening experience. Personally I think it has to do with how various speakers reproduce the mid-range frequencies where vocals lie, as I explained above.

 

[Cibola]

I don't think the vocals are buried to the point of being inaudible, at least not on my system.

Understood. You made it clear you were responding to other comments and I found your points helpful as I'm relatively new to this.

 

[blue.monk]

I don't think the vocals are buried to the point of being inaudible, at least not on my system. They're just not quite as prominent as you'd like - for me turning down the rear speakers between 3-4dB results in a much more balanced/pleasant listening experience. Personally I think it has to do with how various speakers reproduce the mid-range frequencies where vocals lie, as I explained above.

Thank you for the analysis, Dave. This is an interesting discussion. If I could add my two cents, I think the issue is more basic. Most of the time the lead vocal is presented only in the center channel with just a hint of reverb trail in the other channels. As a result it doesn’t sound well-intergraded to my ears. Even after boosting the center a few dB it still comes across as a dry localized vocal against a huge, reverb-laden soundstage. I feel the center-only lead vocal approach works fine for the dryer 70’s recordings but not so much when dealing with that big 80’s sound. In this case I would have preferred some lead vocal support in the front speakers.

 

[himey]

Kap'n you are right, the center channel is mixed to a lower level which buries the vocals. I have the Blu-Ray edition so the DVDA may not have this problem. I had to make a copy and add 4.5 dB to the center channel to make it worth listening to. There is nothing wrong with my system or settings. I put the Blu-Ray in and went to another room and the vocals could barely be heard. There is a huge issue with the center channel on the Blu-Ray edition IMHO.

I am listening to the dts from the bluray and not having any problems with center channel vocals.

 

[SMS]

I don't think the vocals are buried to the point of being inaudible, at least not on my system. They're just not quite as prominent as you'd like - for me turning down the rear speakers between 3-4dB results in a much more balanced/pleasant listening experience. Personally I think it has to do with how various speakers reproduce the mid-range frequencies where vocals lie, as I explained above.

Thanks for the analysis steelydave. I have never thought the vocals were buried in this mix, but I do recall turning down the rears a little (about 2db) with this mix. It isn't unusual for me to tweak the rears (and LFE) levels by a 1-2db for any particular surround mix, so I never thought much of it. Perhaps that is why I didn't hear the same buried vocals that other experienced.