Review of The Doors' L.A. Woman DVD-Audio

Hello,

One of the best CD remasters of a classic rock album is the one done of The Doors' L.A. Woman album (their last album with Jim Morrison). This remaster was done by the original engineer and the original producer. This combination helped to insure that the result was both technically and musically faithful to the original. The original stereo mixdown master tapes were used, and the result sounds about as good as can be done for this album in the redbook CD format.

So, when I saw the name of the original producer on the DVD-Audio released of L.A. Woman, I thought that it would share all the qualities of the fine CD remaster, only with better sound quality and surround sound.

However, this DVD-Audio release is quite disappointing.

I directly compared the hit song "Love Her Madly" on both disks, and frankly, the best sound is obtained by playing the CD remaster in Dolby Pro Logic II. (Using DPLII often helps stereo releases by opening up the sound.) The new surround mix is poorly thought out - for example, the vocals, bass and drums are all primarily in the center channel. Not only is a dubious choice for those lucky enough to have 5 full range speakers, it's disastrous for those who have small HT center channel speakers with 4 inch drivers. (Other DVD-A's, such as Deep Purple - "Machine Head", have the center channel carry only information common to the LF and LR channels, which is much more practical for the average HT system.)

The rear surrounds are mostly used in a "gimmicky" fashion, or just to park arbitrarily chosen instruments (surround mixers seem to often forget that the human ear does not hear rear sounds as well as front sounds).

Overall, while not horrendous, the DVD-A mix is simply not up to the standards of the remastered CD, despite the use of the higher resolution equipment. When you add that the only extra is a "music video" which simply consists of one of the same songs from the album with clips of the band, I can safely recommend that listeners avoid this DVD-A and instead buy the fine and definitive remastered CD release of this excellent rock classic.

I agree, this one ranks way low for me. This was one of the first DVD-A's I bought, and I was pretty disappointed. I think the main problem might be the fact that, given the fact that the album was only recorded on 8-track, there really just wasn't a lot that could be done, surround-wise, with the mix. Botnick tries to compensate by bouncing stuff all over the place in some sort of effort to make it "interesting," but in fact it turns out to be rather distracting and gimicky (a complaint I voiced in another thread on this board). Hearing Jim's voice bounce around all five speakers for the "Mr. Mojo Rising" section of "LA Woman" is annoying as hell. Ditto the drum break on "Love Her Madly" that inexplicably bounces to the rears. Ditto the organ on "The Changeling" that starts out the song in the front, then moves almost arbitrarily to the rears. Ugh.

Plus, Botnick took it upon himself to include little bits that were mixed/edited out of the original release. So we get some extra (pointless) vocalizations at the beginning of "Cars Hiss By My Window" that were better left unheard. Somewhat more interesting are an extra verse to "Cars," and a bit of guitar noodling that serves as the intro to "LA Woman." Still, I'm a bit of a purist about such things, and I think those "alternate" versions should have been relegated to bonus tracks, and leave the original design intact. (That's my biggest gripe with the Fleetwood Mac "Rumours" DVD-A as well.)

Replying to my own reply...

Thanks to one of our esteemed board members, I managed to score a DTS conversion of the quad "Best of the Doors" collection, and had a chance to listen to the whole thing last night. I have to say, I think I actually prefer those mixes to what was done with the "LA Woman" DVD-A. There's only a couple tracks that overlap ("Love Her Madly" and "Riders On the Storm," but I think in both cases, the quad mixes beat out the 5.1's. "Love Her Madly" in particular is very kick-ass in quad - none of that obnoxious flying drum crap that I mention in my previous post. It's still a pretty aggressive mix (as can be expected when you only have 8 channels on your master tape to deal with), but it still held together really well, and actually feels like a solid performance by one group all in the same room (unlike the newer mixes). And even though this was a copy from a quad reel tape, the fidelity was pretty outstanding throughout.

By the way, the rest of the "Best Of" disc is equally outstanding, as well. Again, we're talking about a group that only ever recorded in 4- and 8-track, but the quad mixes are still pretty cool. What's interesting is that for some of the 4-track stuff (basically the material from the first album), they seemed to mix it all "diagonally" - bass/drums in the rear-left, Jim's voice centered, organ/guitar front-right (or some variation thereof). Once they got into 8-track, things get a lot more interesting. I was particularly impressed with the mix for "Moonlight Drive." Even the curious choice of including (in fact, opening with) a live version of "Who Do You Love" (from their 1969 live album) made for a decent mix.

Very thoughtful and insightful analysis there! Thanks!

I would tend to agree with your assessment.