Can I ask the thread … there are various comments here. I’m differentiating between something that’s a surround mix that’s “not to my taste / could be better” and something that actually sounds like it’s very badly recorded and has gone ahead as a release anyway.
I’ve now auditioned the blu ray, the blu ray audio and the DVD. The same soundtrack is present on each.
Non-technical review - akin to watching a high quality filmed video, with cotton wool in your ears.
Slightly less non-technical review - the Stereo mix is a long way from being good but it simply sounds like a bad quality muffled recording kicks in. The video begins with In The Dead of Night, with crystal clear audience sound, until the keyboard part kicks in and you can immediately tell it’s muffled - no definition or top end, just a mess of mids and bass. So as instruments come in, they’re all fighting for the same frequency range, creating a mush. By the time you get to the mid section there is some amazing playing going on with no definition. So when there are keyboards you can barely hear the guitar. John Wetton’s vocal sounds like it’s being picked up by incidental mics. It’s almost as if the only recording captured has been some distant / overhead or audience mic and they’ve just gone with what they had.
It’s also notable that when the music stops, with no real fade, crystal clear crowd noise kicks in and then switches off the instant the music begins.
In the multichannel version everything above is pretty much exacerbated. The intro to Thirty Years with keyboard pad and the electric guitar has a bit of definition, but then Wetton’s vocal kicks in, no doubt note perfect, but sounding like a very low quality mp3, compressed to death and lacking definition.
I’m sure someone would be able to a spectral analysis to explain in more detail what the recording issue (assuming it’s that) is. Much as I love his mixes, I doubt this is even a job that Stephen Tayler could fix - I think it’s the source being worked from that’s the root of the problem … or else just a massive quality control gap that’s the same faulty mix out across the 3 disc formats in the set.
As a side note, I’m not sure what the point of a blu ray video and blu ray audio is, when they both contain the same audio.