I just picked Queen's "Night at the Opera" DVD-A/DTS set yesterday at Borders. It sounds REALLY nice, and gives my Sequels a much-needed chance to really "rock out". I also picked up Diana Kralls "Girl in the Other Room Dual Layer DVD-A, and the SACD releast of Tchaikovsky's 1812 (Kunzel, Cincinnati Pops on Telarc), and Rickie Lee Jones "Duchess of Coolsville"
The Queen disc is VERY nice. I would recommend it, if you're a Queen fan. It's a very witty album, and is full of musical references to English kitsch, Vaudeville, and Classical music. And this recording is delightful.
The Diana Krall DVD-A is also very nice. Full of ambience and air, and the Dolby Digital really helps bring the perfomance "home". Again, I think "Temptation" (track 3) is perhaps one of the best "reference" tracks ever for demonstrating what a small acoustic combo should sound like...
The Tchaikivsky 1812 is even better in SACD. I have the original Telarc release of this one (the one with the digitally-recorded cannons, and warning label). This is the first CD I ever knocked pictures of the wall in my house with, and that warning label is for real. You'd better have some SERIOUS amps, and woofers that can handle it if you're going to play this one even close to performance levels. The addition of the Kiev Symphony Chorus on this new release make it even more goosebump-inducing that the original.
I'm a HUGE fan of RLJ. I've got almost all her previos releases in both CD and Vinyl, and I think she's perhaps one of the most under-rated voices and songwriters/lyricists in modern Jazz. Aside from the fact that her "street-angel" couce is just chillingly haunting, her lysrics are some of the most poetic and genuinely intimate of ANY contemorary songwriter. This new compilation is very nicely done--copiuos liner notes, excellent re-mastering on some of the tracks, and the addition of the half-dozen "demo" recordings and another half-dozen live tracks on Disc 3 are just a real treat for RLJ fans. My only problem with this disc is that some of the tracks were obviously lifted directly from previous masters, and not really edited to fit into this format of "seperate" tracks. Some of RLG's early albums were more like studio versions of a concert--where each song flows into the next without any breaks, and when a song like that appears on "Duchess", they just chop it out of the original masters and plop it into the mix, so that it starts abruptly an ends just as awkwardly. I thought my new OPPO was skippng or mistracking, but after going back and listening to the begining of these tracks several times, I realized what was going on. They could have at least given these tracks a gentle fade-in and fade-out, As it stands, there are parts of this set that sound like a badly-made "mix tape", and for $32, I really expect a lot better production quality. But aside from those few dicey edits, this is a REAL listenable disc for die-hard RLJ fans.
--Richard