Having practically everything by FGTH already in my collection, I was excited listening to the music in 5.1 surround sound. Some negative reviews were, however, a warning that the sound may disappoint.
On that sound issue, I both agree and disagree. The mixes are in a way immaculate and the lack of bass is, from my point of view, not wholly justified. The problem lies much more in the sound style of that period; very crystal and "pure" at the expense of depth. This means that the mixing would really needed a re-mix of a sort or even some re-recordings to be up to par of today's accepted sound imaging. Hence, the 5.1 mix is not as good as one maybe could have hoped for but compare the original sound to albums such as Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon and it becomes obvious that the comparison is not justified.
The song selection is excellent: San Jose, Ferry Cross the Mersey and Born To Run being absolute delights. The choice of having the full length album version of Welcome ... adds further value to the set. There are, however, two very dubious choices of versions, worse yet their biggest hits, Relax and Two Tribes. The versions one would expect are either the single versions or the 12 inch ones. Sorry, but the chosen versions are the inferior versions taken from the Welcome.... album. This applies especially to Two Tribes which of course has the classic well known 12 inch version. The album version differs also considerably from the single version, lacking the ferocity and innovativeness in production which had in a sense been cleaned up, and sterilized, for the album. This alone is worth ducking a star from this release.
Despite some shortcomings this set is well worth buying and surround sound wise excluded a great compilation of their biggest hits. Hopefully Welcome To The Pleasuredome will one day also be released in a 5.1 version, including then hopefully the other mixes of Relax and Two Tribes.
Previously I had only heard of the one song "Relax" so I am a neophyte to FGTH (Frankie goes to Hollywood). First of all the surround mix by Trevor Horn is remarkable. I was totally captivated the sounds swirling throughout the room--STEREO is DEAD...long live surround! The music is uplifting and full of energy. It has fast become my favorite SACD. My friends who don't have a universal player (SACD, DVD-audio) are jealousy cause they can't enjoy the RAGE HARD SACD because it doesn't come in DVD-audio. Buy it if
you have an SACD player, sit back and let the music engulf you and take you to another realm! Play it LOUD!!!
My rating is based on how I like the Music and the Multichannel mix. On this recording the mix is very strange. I had to reset my system to make it sound good. The "flat" setting on my equalizer makes this a bad trip. It needs serious trimming. I tried a trim from i-tunes recommended for "classical music". It's up (4 dB on 32 Hz), 5 dB on 64 Hz, 3 dB on 125 Hz and 2 dB on 250 Hz. I added the high frequencies also. For the centre speaker I did a "vocal" setting from i-tunes.
I did a hardware change. I connected the surround channels with the back-channels so I had music n 7 speakers, similar mix in SR and SBR and similar in SL and SBL. The mix in this recording is difficult for the S and the SB speakers. As I use two very different speakers for these positions, the mix now turned out stunningly.
The new setting gave a remarkable change. The music came to life and some of the tracks are now amazing to listen to.
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