The Moody Blues - Live at Albert Hall

Music DVD's are a special breed - we've all got some. Many people find them to be excellent value due to their higher replayability compared to movie discs.

Of course music quality is paramount to me for music dvd's - in fact I have generally stayed away from most because the musical quality hasn't been up to scratch in my opinion. 192k/s Dolby 2.0 isn't exactly going to scream at you especially if your HT setup is quite adept at music. PCM 2.0 is the same as music CD so it's fairly blah.

Video quality is generally second rate due to the fact that most are concert highlights or other live performances - and that old bigbear, video vs. film recording rears its ugly head.

However the biggest determinent for most people is if the artist appeals to them - the highest quality disc will be no use to you if you can't stand the artist. Those Corrs music dvd's seem to be quite popular for some reason if not for music content alone.

In that respect, I will not go on about the artists - you can find out all out the Moody Blues on their official site:

http://www.moodyblues.co.uk

Me? I'm a passing fan - half the songs are quite good on this dvd, the other half you can take it or leave it. This is typical of most CD/DVD discs I buy. It is a rare disc if I like the _entire_ track listing!

The standouts would be the opening 'Overture' and the two standards 'Your Wildest Dreams' and 'Nights in White Satin'.

In a sentence - they are oldies-style, UK classical rock with a very MOR taste. They are well before my time and by the looks of the studio audience, appeal to the family-orientated 'older crowd' :-)

A strange lack of stage diving and general mosh pit activities?

This is a live recording on the 1st of May, last year at the Royal Albert Hall and part of the new Warner and Image Entertainment line of music dvd's. There are more of this line of dual format discs coming and I'm glad that they are committed to dts for music. You've already seen the Eagles, Santana and Sheryl Crow as dual format discs at the shops.

Track List:

1. Overture
2. Tuesday Afternoon
3. English Sunset
4. Words You Say
5. The Story In Your Eyes
6. I Know You're Out There Somewhere
7. Haunted
8. Your Wildest Dreams
9. Isn't Life Strange
10. I'm Just A Singer (In A Rock and Roll Band)
11. Nights In White Satin
12. Legend Of A Mind
13. Question
14. Ride My See Saw

The video quality is remarkably good. It is framed 1.33:1 not 1.78:1 as the box says. The dominant colour seems to be the blue of Albert Hall. That tends to tint the general colour of things like skin tones and the stage. Everything seems correct and pleasant to the eye. My only complaint would be that slight blur of video compared to film sources which is what most of us are accustomed to. The many pans are smooth and the whole thing looks like a lot of attention has been paid to pre- and post video production. Good colours, good contrast although an obvious lack of depth of field on long crowd pans is present, but that is par for the course.

A glaring aspect of this is that the patterns of the band members' clothes aren't exactly pin sharp due to the use of video. The lead singer's white shirt seems to a flat matt of white rather than a something with texture which is typical of a anamorphic widescreen presentation we're used to seeing.

I suspect as this is a native R2 master, the whole video footage may have been shot for UK PAL FTA TV which explains the fluid motion and the zero format conversion for our Aust. PAL market. Who says PAL and dts doesn't get along? :-)

There are three tracks on this disc, a basic Dolby 2.0, a Dolby 5.0 and a dts 5.0 - that's right, there's no subwoofer at all. This might seem like a big loss however this type of music is not big on the sub. The only bass you get is when the orchestra uses the big kettle type drums - mid bass rather than true LFE. The bass that does come thru the three tracks has a good quality and weight to it - more so on the dts track.

The only thing I will say about the 2.0 track is that it is good near CD quality and the DPL decoder can pull decent ambience from it. It is 256k/s.

The ac3 5.0 track is not too bad - it has reasonable spatiality but it seems rather thin and localised to the particular speakers; basically I found it fairly 'unmusical' - I would say that it might be even be worse than a normal CD soundtrack. It is 448k/s.

It depends on what your expectations are - if you've never heard of dts before you'll think the ac3 track is actually quite good; read on however :-)

Well let's get onto the meat of it - the dts track is true to form, substantially louder than the ac3 track; 10-15 dB over in fact. I knew that SPL meter would come in handy...

However the musical fidelity is startlingly better than the ac3 track. I'm talking about things such as the fidelity of instruments, vocal intelligibility and front presentation of the band. Because of the variety of instruments used, the dts track easily steps ahead of the ac3 track. There are strings, wind instruments, guitars, the cymbals etc. all presented in great musical detail - in fact you hear instruments either hard to discern or flat sounding on the ac3 track.

On paper the difference is not huge - a dts 768k vs ac3 448k track. Is it all due to the bitrate difference or the codec? Or both?

This is not a Eagles style dts soundtrack where you have trumpets coming from the rear and everything mixed 'ping pong' fashion - everything is soundstaged correctly with the L/C/R handling the bulk of the work and the rears restricted to audience participation.

There are no extras - at all. There is a short description of the icons used on Warners discs. I don't know why Warners don't even put a short discography or band bio. Is that so much to ask?

Umm... next section.

The technical presentation of this disc is excellent. If all music discs were this well prepared, us dvd reviewers would be out of a job. However this high standard is not mirrored in the dearth of quality extras.

If you're a fan and dts is part of your life, you must have this disc. I must admit that I sometimes spin my very small collection of dts music dvd's and just listen to the music - it's that good. And this disc would make Digital Theater Systems quite proud.