Greetings dear QQers.
I have been traveling and largely offline. While in Scotland I picked up this disc with no idea of what it held. Just a desire to buy some surround in Scotland, I suppose. I was glad to find a poll for this disc. This for me will be a largely academic exercise because I do not like the music. That said, I do appreciate honest appraisals of surround discs, and I think I have something to add to this poll.
The relevant Wikipedia entry for this band begins like this: "Children of Bodom is a melodic death metal band from Espoo, Finland."
So there you have it. Those who are not fans of Death Metal can probably move on. The music itself is, to me, disturbing, grating, overbearing, and un-enjoyable. But I suspect that there are those who search the web looking for new music who use those adjectives as key words to find the stuff they really like. To quote the eminent musicologist Dr Hans Keller from a famous 1967 Pink Floyd interview "they have an audience, and people who have an audience ought to be heard. Perhaps it is my fault that I don’t appreciate them.”
So I am taking the time to comment just in case there are a few death metal fans kicking around here who are looking for surround titles. I say: not so fast on the previous reviews: the quote "It has NO 5.1 whatsoever" is simply not true. Sorry Baker - no offence intended.
Even with all channels at nominal one gets the occasional in-your-face center channel guitar solo. This is not a mix choice I would make, but it IS discrete. I dropped out the front mains and the center goes from zero to full, burns a solo, then drops back to zero, or at least ambient.
As for the rears, they are poorly balanced, but again there ARE discrete elements on offer. To hear them well I bumped my amp to +10db extra on both rears, and all kinds of stuff popped out. There is some ambience on offer to be sure, but I also found guitar, keyboards, and vocals, often discrete from the fronts, other times doubling the fronts but not throughout the whole song, so there is a fill/unfill effect in evidence.
Again and for the record, I do not even like this music. But if there are death metal fans out there, I would actually recommend this IF you are willing to either tweak your system every time you play it - or - you are able to extract all the music and boost the rears manually, then reburn for playback. Of course with either method the noise floor comes up as well, but this music rarely has the sort of dynamics where this is noticeable.
Even with the adjustment, this is an unbalanced and rather odd mix, but it ain't nothin'. There is plenty of ambience-only crap out there that falls short of this attempt to place discrete elements in the center and rears. This is simply poorly realized in the nominal balance.
Here is what I found when I bumped the rears up +10db:
01 Hellhounds On My Trail Rears: isolated guitar & keyboard parts, Center: Isolated guitar solo
02 Blooddrunk Rears: isolated vocal & keyboard parts, Center: Isolated guitar solo
03 Lobodomy Rears: isolated vocal & keyboard parts
04 One Day You Will Cry Rears: isolated keyboard parts, Center: Isolated guitar solo
05 Smile Pretty For The Devil Rears: Isolated guitar solo & keyboard parts, Center: Isolated guitar solo
06 Tie My Rope Rears: isolated keyboard & vocal parts
07 Done With Everything, Die For Nothing Rears: isolated guitar solo & keyboard solo
08 Banned From Heaven Rears: isolated keyboard & guitar parts & solo, Center: Isolated guitar solo
09 Roadkill Morning Rears: isolated guitar parts, Center: Isolated guitar solo
It may interest you to know that at +10db the rears were never too loud for the rest of the balance.
One other odd note: on my Oppo BDP-95 the pause button does not pause this disc. I can hit stop and then play to resume from the same position.
OK folks, whoever has this, I am curious to know what you think if you make the recommended adjustments. I still call it a 4, but not a dead 1.
When this finished I put on Elton John - Honky Chateau to cleanse my pallet. Beautiful!