Lighthouse 5.1

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My copy came yesterday. I listened to a few tracks on the CD as well as the DVD and noticed a couple of things:

CD: One Fine Morning decoded with PLIIx creates an extremely satisfying surround sound field. Lots of instruments coming from the rears. It sounds as if the song was encoded in some sort of matrix, although others believe that it was not. I sampled another couple of tracks on the album, but did not get the same enveloping effect.

5.1 DVD: For reasons unknown to me, the bass comes across as extremely weak and possibly confined to the center speaker. I set the center speaker to "NONE" so that the channel was routed to the fronts. The bass was then much stronger but still needed significant juicing of the tone controls to achieve good tonal balance. With this fix, I really like what I'm hearing.
 
Two songs from Lighthouse in EV-4 , two hit singles that is . One each from Quad Samplers whereby Evolution Records issued Matrix Encoded tracks from their stable of artists.

Wouldn't be a shock that their "Stereo Dimension" series were encoded, but I think historically it's somewhat unlikely as at this time in Quad Promotions (73/72) many and most labels were pushing Quad LP'S .

I did compare the Lighthouse and Gloria Lorring tracks on the sampler with the regular LPs and the mix sounded a bit different to me. So I do think the sampler was remixed for quad. So I think the "stereo dimension" LPs are not quad, just my opinion.

vinylguy4
 
I recently recieved my copy of 40 Years of Sunny Days. I listened to the CD first, sound was a bit underwhelming typical CD brick-walled sound, the last several songs sounded a bit better but were unfamiliar to me.
The DVD sounds nice but too bad it's lossy Dolby, the strings and horns lack the punch they should have, reminds me of the sound you get from cassettes. I'm sure that if it was released on DVD-Audio or Blu-ray it would sound much better. It's not bad surround wise, much better than most modern 5.1 releases. Dan Clancy does a good job of imitating Bob McBride on the classic hits. The dialog between tracks on the DVD, while interesting detracts a bit from the music, I will have to remove it when I copy the tracks to my hard drive.
As I mentioned previously the CD "Thoughts of Moving On" on the European Prog Temple label sounds good, It's not brick-walled like other releases. I've ordered a copy of "One Fine Morning" on Prog Temple as well, I'm not happy with the sound of my Japanese Blu-spec disc. Blu-spec discs don't sound any better, but they are more durable as they use the same plastic as Blu-rays.
At some point I might rip my LP's, they are still in good shape and always sounded great.
 
Well I got my copy of One Fine Morning on Prog Temple and it's a big improvement over The Japanese Blu-spec disc. Screen shots show the level differences between the two on the track One Fine Morning, The higher levels are from the Japaneses disc. I do prefer the mini LP packaging and cover art of the Japanese CD though, see scans of both.
I also picked up the first three (RCA) Lighthouse albums remastered on BGO, on 2 CD's; and they sound great as well. The first Lighthouse album sounds fantastic played through the Photolume (QSD-2, clone) decoder, almost sounds discrete. That first album can be described as psychedelic as is a lot of music from that time period, I love it. It contains elements that remind me of BS&T, The Doors and even Neil Young.
 

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PHP:
we were just discussing Lighthouse recently. Found out today that Skip Prokop one of the founding members of the band died today or it was announced today. Also found out he grew up a couple of blocks from where I lived in Hamilton Ont. RIP Skip
 
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