The Year of the Box

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Favourite 2011 Boxset:


  • Total voters
    58
Ok - I can finally vote as Aqualung arrived from ImportCDS.

My two contenders are:
  • Aqualung; and
  • Wish You Were Here.
Box Packaging - Winner: Aqualung
Aqualung - The packaging is superb - I love the canvas box - even better than the Steven Wilson boxes - The only gripe is the sleeves in the Vinyl for the discs - my Blu-ray Disc was loose when I opened the box.

Wish You Were Here - The packing is a bit "cheap" compared to Aqualung - and you have to dig into the box to get the discs + superflous crap.

Content - Winner: Wish You Were Here
I personally prefer Wish You Were Here over Aqualung.

Surround Mix - Winner: Aqualung (SW 5.1 Mix)
SW has done an awesome job on this. Way better than Both the quad and 5.1 from Wish You Were Here.

Fidelity - Winnner: Aqualung
As most people have said the improvement in fidelity on the SW mix is huge.

Music Extras (not marbles!!!) - Winner: Aqualung
With Aqualung you get 4 mixes of the original album, inlcuding 5.1 and quad and the original and new stereo mixes. You also get bonus 5.1 tracks!!! And tons of extra tracks...

I love it that you get the quad and 5.1 on the Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull.


SO - AQUALUNG WINS!!!
:51banana:
 
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It's been great to have this many quality titles releases this year. It's just too bad they figured out a way to get so much money out of us to get them. I would much prefer just the standalone bluray. Anyway, I've got to vote for Aqualung. What a great release! The new mix is incredible and 4 extra songs in surround is a huge plus for me.

K
 
can't vote but got dsotm set and it was a mess. The dvd audio only had a mark, I can live with it but still for the money they could come up with a bettter way. It's so obvious these discs will go where they want and it all get shipped, and they all end up with damage. I just don't get it.
 
I dutifully voted after having heard most of the offerings (and have a Certificate of Penury to prove it); but I believe being forced to choose between DSOTM, WYWH, Quadrophenia, Layla and Aqualung should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Desert island discs all...making 2011 the Chinese Year of the Box indeed.
 
I dutifully voted after having heard most of the offerings (and have a Certificate of Penury to prove it); but I believe being forced to choose between DSOTM, WYWH, Quadrophenia, Layla and Aqualung should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Desert island discs all...making 2011 the Chinese Year of the Box indeed.

REALLY made me LOL!!!!
IT'S ABSOLUTELY TRUE...couldn't they have been released a few years back when we all had scratch????
 
I bought it and was really looking forward to it...honestly, I was a little disappointed. Maybe others will disagree with me (maybe vehemently), but I don't think it's sounds that great. Check that...the clarity/crispness of the recording is amazing, but I don't think the quad mix actually sounds much different from a stereo mix. If you look at the poll of favorites surround recordings, you'll see most of the top 10 or 20 are recordings where the back/surround speakers are much more prominent in the mixes. There's been a trend lately, especially in Steven Wilson surround mixes, to use less and less of the rear channels and much less use of what he refers to a "gimmicky" sounding use of surround. Personally, I don't find guitars swirling around my living room 'gimmicky', I call it AMAZING! Listen to any of the earlier P-Tree recordings (all in the top 15) and you'll hear incredible use of surround. Great separation, great multi-channel majesty. It was primarily Steven Wilson and P-Tree (as well as Fleetwood Mac & Eagles) DVD-A's that got me into surround recordings. I now find myself a little bit bored with the latest surround work of Steven. Anathema? Sleepy. The Incident? Except for 1-2 songs, sleepy. Opeth's Heritage? Sorry, I WANT to like it, I REALLY DO, I just DON'T!! Is anyone else with me on this?
 
Speaking of "Year of the..." wouldn't Al Stewart's album "Year of the Cat" sound great in surround?
 
I bought it and was really looking forward to it...honestly, I was a little disappointed. Maybe others will disagree with me (maybe vehemently), but I don't think it's sounds that great. Check that...the clarity/crispness of the recording is amazing, but I don't think the quad mix actually sounds much different from a stereo mix. If you look at the poll of favorites surround recordings, you'll see most of the top 10 or 20 are recordings where the back/surround speakers are much more prominent in the mixes. There's been a trend lately, especially in Steven Wilson surround mixes, to use less and less of the rear channels and much less use of what he refers to a "gimmicky" sounding use of surround. Personally, I don't find guitars swirling around my living room 'gimmicky', I call it AMAZING! Listen to any of the earlier P-Tree recordings (all in the top 15) and you'll hear incredible use of surround. Great separation, great multi-channel majesty. It was primarily Steven Wilson and P-Tree (as well as Fleetwood Mac & Eagles) DVD-A's that got me into surround recordings. I now find myself a little bit bored with the latest surround work of Steven. Anathema? Sleepy. The Incident? Except for 1-2 songs, sleepy. Opeth's Heritage? Sorry, I WANT to like it, I REALLY DO, I just DON'T!! Is anyone else with me on this?
To me, with SW we are seeing the evolution of a surround mixer. It is fascinating.
 
Speaking of "Year of the..." wouldn't Al Stewart's album "Year of the Cat" sound great in surround?

Absolutely wonderful! Chances sadly are virtually nil.

Also doubt we'll see (m)any boxes before Septembers' Thick As A Brick now.
Even Ziggy next week is just an LP/DVD combo and on paper a 40th Anniversary of that had "Box Set" written all over it.

Meantime I bet there'll be at least half a dozen more CD/DVD combo's along the lines of the recent Gentle Giants/ELO before the year is out.
 
I bought it and was really looking forward to it...honestly, I was a little disappointed. Maybe others will disagree with me (maybe vehemently), but I don't think it's sounds that great. Check that...the clarity/crispness of the recording is amazing, but I don't think the quad mix actually sounds much different from a stereo mix. If you look at the poll of favorites surround recordings, you'll see most of the top 10 or 20 are recordings where the back/surround speakers are much more prominent in the mixes. There's been a trend lately, especially in Steven Wilson surround mixes, to use less and less of the rear channels and much less use of what he refers to a "gimmicky" sounding use of surround. Personally, I don't find guitars swirling around my living room 'gimmicky', I call it AMAZING! Listen to any of the earlier P-Tree recordings (all in the top 15) and you'll hear incredible use of surround. Great separation, great multi-channel majesty. It was primarily Steven Wilson and P-Tree (as well as Fleetwood Mac & Eagles) DVD-A's that got me into surround recordings. I now find myself a little bit bored with the latest surround work of Steven. Anathema? Sleepy. The Incident? Except for 1-2 songs, sleepy. Opeth's Heritage? Sorry, I WANT to like it, I REALLY DO, I just DON'T!! Is anyone else with me on this?

That's really odd, as I find Wilson's mixes to be pretty much the only ones that truly utilize all five speakers as they should be. There's sound all over the place, it's all separated out in a manner you can only do with multis, with vocal perfectly centered. It's almost as if I'm hearing the opposite of what you are.
 
Just so long as he doesn't lose his bottle and evolve into an "ambiance in the rears-only" kinda guy..!!


that wouldn't happen, seems he already outgrown tight limitation of stereo and in such case there is no way back.
b.t.w. from mine own experience i can say - mixing into surround are much easier task than into stereo and impossible
to understand of those conservative engineers who doing from original multis... surround releases with double stereo.
 
that wouldn't happen, seems he already outgrown tight limitation of stereo and in such case there is no way back.
b.t.w. from mine own experience i can say - mixing into surround are much easier task than into stereo and impossible
to understand of those conservative engineers who doing from original multis... surround releases with double stereo.

We rarely agree, but we do agree here.

As someone who does a lot of work from stereo to surround, I always say that there should never be a case in which I am able to give you better separation than someone who had access to the multis, yet I feel that, more often than not, we can derive a more immersive mix from stereo than what is handed to us by the labels. That's not tooting my own horn. That's wondering what the hell these folks are thinking. In a perfect world, it would NEVER happen that way.
 
I would love to see more from ELO but I highly doubt it. There were plans for a MFSL release of 'Out of the Blue' about a year or so ago. I had put in my pre-order early, but for some reason 6 months later it was announced it wasn't going to happen. I have read elsewhere that the original track/master recordings for OOTB are gone and they are not able to do it in surround. Such a shame! Hope to see more titles come out! I am actually now listening to music I have never heard of before just because it's in 5.1 surround!
 
I would love to see more from ELO but I highly doubt it. There were plans for a MFSL release of 'Out of the Blue' about a year or so ago. I had put in my pre-order early, but for some reason 6 months later it was announced it wasn't going to happen. I have read elsewhere that the original track/master recordings for OOTB are gone and they are not able to do it in surround. Such a shame! Hope to see more titles come out! I am actually now listening to music I have never heard of before just because it's in 5.1 surround!

I seem to recall a period of tantalising over at sa-cd.net about an upcoming Out of the Blue SACD, some time ago a member there was saying it was being worked on and would appear.. but here we are, years later and.. Zilch.
 
I would love to see more from ELO but I highly doubt it. There were plans for a MFSL release of 'Out of the Blue' about a year or so ago. I had put in my pre-order early, but for some reason 6 months later it was announced it wasn't going to happen. I have read elsewhere that the original track/master recordings for OOTB are gone and they are not able to do it in surround. Such a shame! Hope to see more titles come out! I am actually now listening to music I have never heard of before just because it's in 5.1 surround!

5.1 definitely broadens your musical horizons and opens you up to all sorts of artists and sounds you'd probably never have explored before in plain stereo. it's just a shame it's so often born out of a lack of 5.1 music by artists we'd normally listen to...
 
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