Dolby Surround CD's - What's Your Latest?

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fredblue

Surroundophile Extraordinaire
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Great Tenor Arias (Verdi, Gluck, Rossini, Donizetti) - Juan Diego Florez (Hybrid MultiCh SACD),
Systematic Chaos: Special Edition - Dream Theater (CD + 5.1 Dolby DVD-V),
Symphony No.6: "Tragic" - Mahler/Levi/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (Telarc "Surround Sound" CD) *,
The Immaculate Collection - Madonna (Q Sound CD) **,
Amused To Death - Roger Waters (Q Sound CD) **,
Away From The Sun - 3 Doors Down (DVD-Audio/Non-DualDisc version).

* Another one of those Telarc "Surround Sound" encoded CDs, which I just picked up in a thrift store on the way home for £3. These are a rather fun very recent accident/discovery for me, I never knew they existed before on Telarc, I've seen the likes of Tomita on RCA Dolby encoded CD's and so on before but not these Telarc releases. Anyhoo, onto "the pile" it goes!

** Prompted by bmoura's "Roger Waters - Amused To Death" SACD thread, I went a-hunting for the Q Sound encoded Amused To Death CD in a thrift store and found it, in great shape, for £3 (it has "Q Sound" and Q Sound logo on disc itself
and 'so-small-blink-and-you'd-miss-it' QSound logo top right hand corner of rear inlay.), plus I picked up Madonna's Immaculate Collection (also in Q Sound, afaik.. it has Q Sound + Logo on disc itself) for £2. I've probably got it already but wanted to be sure I had one with Q Sound on label just in case the one I have doesn't (knowing my luck!) :eek:
 
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Please post ONLY Dolby Surround CD's here. There are other threads for matrix CD/LP, DVD-A/SACD, Blu-Ray-A, CD-4 LP and Quad tape.

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I've been in Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC. Awesome. Paul Winter is pretty awesome, too.
 
Russian Nights - Erich Kunzel Cincinnati Pops Orchestra (Hybrid MultiCh SACD),
The Garden Of Cosmic Speculation - Michael Gandolfi (Hybrid MultiCh SACD),
Dancing In The Dark - Tierney Sutton (Hybrid MultiCh SACD),

Some good ones there. The Surround SACDs on Telarc by Tierney Sutton are favorites of mine. She has an interesting take on classic songs. And the Kunzel Surround SACDs are a lot of fun - especially when Telarc's then Chief Recording Engineer Michael Bishop gets out his Digital Surround Sound Special Effects! Be sure to get "Scary Music" with DSD Sound Effects and "Round Up" which features Frankie Laine singing the Theme to Rawhide. Good stuff!
 
Great Tenor Arias (Verdi, Gluck, Rossini, Donizetti) - Juan Diego Florez (Hybrid MultiCh SACD),
Systematic Chaos: Special Edition - Dream Theater (CD + 5.1 Dolby DVD-V),
Symphony No.6: "Tragic" - Mahler/Levi/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (Telarc "Surround Sound" CD) *,
The Immaculate Collection - Madonna (Q Sound CD) **,
Amused To Death - Roger Waters (Q Sound CD) **,
Away From The Sun - 3 Doors Down (DVD-Audio/Non-DualDisc version).

* Another one of those Telarc "Surround Sound" encoded CDs, which I just picked up in a thrift store on the way home for £3. These are a rather fun very recent accident/discovery for me, I never knew they existed before on Telarc, I've seen the likes of Tomita on RCA Dolby encoded CD's and so on before but not these Telarc releases. Anyhoo, onto "the pile" it goes!

** Prompted by bmoura's "Roger Waters - Amused To Death" SACD thread, I went a-hunting for the Q Sound encoded Amused To Death CD in a thrift store and found it, in great shape, for £3 (it has "Q Sound" and Q Sound logo on disc itself
and 'so-small-blink-and-you'd-miss-it' QSound logo top right hand corner of rear inlay.), plus I picked up Madonna's Immaculate Collection (also in Q Sound, afaik.. it has Q Sound + Logo on disc itself) for £2. I've probably got it already but wanted to be sure I had one with Q Sound on label just in case the one I have doesn't (knowing my luck!) :eek:

sad to say but Q-Sound isn't really a surround sound process - its just one of those virtual 'surround sound from 2 speakers" effects that doesn't require any sort of decoding - nor does it decode into anything like what its supposed to sound like when played through a decoder. Spatializer is the same but in its case it was designed to be mixed with Dolby Surround encoded signals to give a 'better than surround' effect and if you don't have a surround set up, you still get the 2 speaker virtual surround. Telarc used Spatializer in combination with Dolby/Shure or Circle Surround on quite a few releases - I think, although I just got up so I may be wrong, that some of the Telarc DTS CD's have the Spatializer logo in the credits. Brad Miller used to take pot shots at the 2channel virtual surround systems like Q Sound in his Widescreen Review articles.

The systems bug me because I cannot hear them - the sound might seem wider or more phasey, but I cannot localize virtual sounds anywhere around me like most people seem to be able to do. Same goes for virtual headphone systems such as Dolby Headphone - it doesn't sound like I'm listening to 5 speakers in a room, just a weird effect that isn't very pleasant.

Anyway, for the Telarc discs, Q-Sound and Spatializer are not matrix surround encoded recordings, although the phase effects of the processes will make them decode well into some sort of surround sound. So to hear them as they were meant to be heard, play them in stereo, without any decoding. Q Sound was used on the 70mm 4-track Mag and both the 35mm and 70mm 4-track Cinema Digital Sound prints of the film The Doors to create audio effects that normal discrete surround could not during the drug tripping scenes. The original AC-3 LD of The Doors used the same mix as the Cinema Digital Sound prints, as did the DVD - I recently got the Blu-ray and it uses the same mix (thankfully) so the Q-Sound effects can still be heard. A number of other films list Q-Sound in their credits, but I can't recall which films.

The extra wide stereo that Q-Sound and Spatializer create was really popular for music mixes in the 90's -Madonna's Immaculate Collection was the first major title to use Q-Sound in a big way - Paula Abdul's first album used Q-Sound on a number of tracks too. But the wide mixes that Q-Sound and the like produce fell out of favor by the late 90's - i believe because, as the BBC found during their quad listening tests, phase effects can be mentally fatiguing to listen to after a while - but they seem to have been making somewhat of a comeback, especially now that DTS owns Spatializer and SRS - Dolby bought a bunch of the virtual surround companies too.
 
Some good ones there. The Surround SACDs on Telarc by Tierney Sutton are favorites of mine. She has an interesting take on classic songs. And the Kunzel Surround SACDs are a lot of fun - especially when Telarc's then Chief Recording Engineer Michael Bishop gets out his Digital Surround Sound Special Effects! Be sure to get "Scary Music" with DSD Sound Effects and "Round Up" which features Frankie Laine singing the Theme to Rawhide. Good stuff!

Thanks so much once again, bmoura! You're an SACD-encyclopaedia!

Onto the wishlist goes "Scary Music"..! Woo! Spooky ooky kooky! :yikes :ugham: :p
 
My latest Dolby Surround CD (purchased 1993ish) - I suppose you could say it was my first Surround album purchased :yikes:

The Symphonic Music of Yes
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It only took me a decade to get a system to play it in surround ...;)
 
The only Dolby Surround CD I have is Rick Wakeman's 'Return To The Centre Of The Earth', which I remember quite liking through my Tate 10(ish) years ago. I wonder if it was encoded from a discrete master - if so it would be a great candidate for a high-rez 5.1 release.
 
Is it any good LK?

I was very underwhelmed w/ this disc- not the surround mix, but the actual music. While Yes can effectively use an orchestra to complement the band, using the orchestra to fill in for the band doesn't work. The results often seemed like Yes muzak to me. I think I listened to the entire disc once and maybe a couple of tracks 2-3 times. Of course, YMMV- take into consideration that Yes is my long-time fave band, so perhaps that is a factor (making it more difficult for me to appreciate what is a large departure), though I love Magnification and the Symphonic Tour (3x in person, many more on the dvd), so I do enjoy Yes w/ orchestra- just not like it was done on this disc.
 
My latest Dolby Surround CD (purchased 1993ish) - I suppose you could say it was my first Surround album purchased :yikes:

The Symphonic Music of Yes
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It only took me a decade to get a system to play it in surround ...;)

Did you also get OYE re-release w/ the SAIL process? I took the bait- don't know why I thought that surround would transform an album I wasn't very keen on into something better... Just the first example of me buying something based mainly on surround, rather than musical content- but back then, there was nothing available in 5.1 and I was dying to replicate the fullness of music I heard in movies in Dolby Surround. But OYE is down at the bottom of the Yes discogarphy, imo, sharing the basement w/ Union.
 
Did you also get OYE re-release w/ the SAIL process? I took the bait- don't know why I thought that surround would transform an album I wasn't very keen on into something better... Just the first example of me buying something based mainly on surround, rather than musical content- but back then, there was nothing available in 5.1 and I was dying to replicate the fullness of music I heard in movies in Dolby Surround. But OYE is down at the bottom of the Yes discogarphy, imo, sharing the basement w/ Union.

Yes - I have that one - and agreed its near the bottom of my list of Yes albums:

Yes debuts the surround sound process pioneered by Seattle Audio Imaging Labs, Inc. (SAIL). SAIL has invented an encoding system that makes music consistently compatible with today's home theater systems. Having eliminated image collapse and synamic frequency response aberrations, the SAIL process results in a superior surround sound experience without any enhancements to the hardware components. For those without surround sound systems, meaning regular stereo systems, there is no difference in output from standard stereo. To make music compatible with today's surround sound systems, SAIL used their REcode process for the album. REcode is a mastering process that renders stereo or two-track material in SAIL surround sound. The process detects the statistical average of the spatial field and translates that to the placement of images in the surround sound field.

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Diggin' the crates...

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Pop/Jazz/Fusion - supposedly the first title to use "StereoSurround" encoding.

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Great fingerstyle guitarist

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I like the marketing point on the back cover "...fully compatible with both stereo and monaural equipment."

I don't have any quad or stand alone matrix decoders so I can't speak to the effectiveness of these recordings vis a vis. They seem to decode fine via DPLII but I don't notice any true "discreetness" going on. They are all fine recordings otherwise.
 
thanks for all the neat info! :) the "Spies" cd looks interesting, what's the album like?

that Adrian Legg must be rare?! I've been looking all over since you posted elmer and can only find the '94 reissue (different cover art, no bag/noose over his head! no Dolby Surround logo either!)
 
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