I recently picked up the latest Springsteen CD, “Devils & Dust,” mainly because it was advertised as being in 5.1 surround sound. I was curious about how that would sound and I have to say…it sounds pretty good. It’s just too bad it’s such an accoustic album…not a whole lot of production going on there.
So I was wondering: are there any other good pop/rock CDs out there in 5.1 surround?
Thanks!
Nine Inch Nails rereleased The Downward Spirial in a 5.1 format last year.
Also, their new album With_Teeth is availabe in a dual-disc format, one side as a ‘standard’ audio CD, the other side as 5.1 DVD-A. I put the word ‘standard’ in quotes because the dual-disc format is technically not redbook-compilant, (the disc is a bit thicker then the standard) and as such can have trouble in some CD players and CD-ROM drives.
Damn you, jweb, those are the only two I know of and the only reason I opened the thread…
In my opinion, the absolute best rock 5.1 mix out there is the 30th anniversary edition of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”, in SACD. It’s fantastic. I’ve got quite a few DTS, DVD-A, and SACD discs, and this one’s the best. It helps also that the music is really improved by the multichannel format - When the clocks start ringing and chiming at the opening to ‘Time’, there’s just all around you. It’s an astounding moment. The footsteps that run from right to left in the stereo mix run around the room. It’s just all very cool.
Also, Beck’s Sea Change is fantastic in SACD. I also have Guero, which has a multi-channel mix but it’s not quite up to the quality of Sea Change.
Also, The Eagles Hell Freezes Over in DTS sounds fantastic. Seven Bridges Road is just beautiful.
What I really, really want is the Beatles catalog in hi-rez, and Pink Floyd’s The Wall. That should be awesome if they ever release it.
Another great disc would be Supertramp’s Crime of the Century. Unfortunately, none of these are out yet.
I’d like to hear more suggestions from other people.
The theatre sounds good, I take it, Sam?
I giggle like a little girl every time I use it.
I just got my main speakers last week, finally. Paradigm Studio 60’s. They sound fantastic. And just for fun, I mounted some bass shakers under my seating, and man it’s a riot. When the T-Rex in Jurassic Park shows up, it feels like he’s inside the room. Best $38 I ever spent.
Anyway, I’ve been on a quest for some great multi-channel sound for a while now. I have some decent stuff, but some of it just isn’t that great. Most of the classical recordings out there make no use of the surrounds at all, other than for a bit of ambience. I guess the idea is to make you feel you’re in the hall with the orchestra, and that works sometimes, but not always. Sometimes there’s just not much of a soundstage at all.
I also have the Police’s greatest hits in DTS. It’s pretty good. DTS isn’t technically as good as SACD or DVD-A, but the quality of the mix is really good, so you really don’t notice the loss.
Two of the best sounding DVD conscerts out there are The Eagles Hell Freezes Over, and Allison Krause + Union Station Live. They are both in DTS, and recorded impeccably.
Heh. We supplied a couple of those for some sort of train display at the Western Development Museum. Bit more powerful, though. Didn’t get to play with them very much before giving them to the people building the thing, sadly. 
I can well imagine they’d add to the fun.
Those buttkickers are great. Not only more powerful, but they use a heavy piston that can oscillate way, way down there, like 5 hz or something. Supposed to be awesome. But they’re about 10X more money than the Aura shakers, and I think the Auras get you about 80% of the way there. Great bang for the buck factor.
The album is mediocre, but John Mayer’s “Heavier Things” in SACD is perhaps the best sounding disc I’ve ever heard. Seal’s “Seal IV” in DVD-A also sounds brilliant.
Other discs I own that sound better in their 2-channel 24/96 modes include:
El Cielo - dredg
Greatest Hits - Frankie Goes to Hollywood
Synchronicity - The Police
Every Breath You Take - The Police
The worst sounding disc I own is “What’s the story (Morning Glory)?” by Oasis.
Not every artist/producer/engineer can pull off a good 5.1 mix.
Or bang for the butt, for that matter. 
Seriously, if you’re looking for a cheap, fun project to enhance your movie watching, those shakers are awesome. You need another amp to power them, but any cheapo old amp will do. I picked up an older yamaha stereo amp at a second hand store, and it works great. All you do is get put a ‘y’ splitter from radio shack on your subwoofer output, feed that into any low-level input on the second amp, and then write the shakers up like a speaker. I put two of them wired in series inside my sofa. You can pull the staples holding the cloth on the bottom, exposing the frame, and just screw the shaker to any strong frame piece. I didn’t have a good spot in my couch, so I cut some 2 x 8’s and screwed the shakers to those, then screwed those across the frame pieces inside the couch.
Done right, and with the levels set correctly, it just acts as though your sub goes down to the subsonic range. Even in rock music it’s great - you can feel the kick drum pounding, low bass notes reverberate through your body.
In the opening scene to “Fellowship of the Ring”, where Sauron is dispatched by having the ring cut off, there’s an effect where a wave of power pulses out from where he was. The frequency starts at maybe 80 hz and drops to 0 over a second or two. Without the shakers, my sub rolls off at maybe 30-40hz, so it doesn’t really do that much. With the shakers, it feels like the evil bastard passes through you on his way back to wherever he came from. Very cool.
A favorite of mine is Queen’s A Night At The Opera.
Other good ones : Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon
Steely Dan, Two Against Nature & Everything Must Go
Bela Fleck, The Bluegrass Sessions
The Doobie Brothers, The Captain And Me
Donald Fagen, The Nightfly & Kamakiriad.
I can’t go to Fry’s without walking through the SACD/DVD-A section. However, I have almost stopped buying regular CD’s altogether. Serious listening requires the best source available. 
Now I just gotta get a house so I can turn it up!
Most of these albums are conversions from 2.0.
If you want to hear an album that is completely composed for 5.1, try Aero by Jean-Micheal Jarre.
It is sort of a greatest hits-albums, but makes great use of your system.
You can play it in 5.1 DD, 5.1 DTS or just normal 2.0 PCM.
It is no pop/rock, though.
Hey, Sam, what are your thoughts on using those things instead of a subwoofer?
I haven’t purchased a sub for a couple of reasons. First, I don’t have the capital to spend on an actual sub (although my receiver has an output for it). Also, when I set up our home theater I used a pair of freestanding speakers I already had; these were able to replicate some of the bass, so I didn’t miss it too much. And the way our house is built the sound would reverberate down the hall to our kids’ rooms, where typically they would be sleeping while the missus and I enjoy our widescreen TV. I’ve been thinking about getting a pair of those but I don’t really want to if it won’t help out with the bass reproduction.
My wife hates the size of my Klipsch Horns so we were shopping for new speakers this weekend. I agreed to go smaller as long as the quality was the same. It was on just such a system that the audio guy put on Alice In Chains - Unplugged. Granted, it’s the only 5.1 album I’ve heard but holy cow, it was awesome. Clear, crisp and all around, it struck me as front row audio at it’s best.
Depends on what kind of mains you have. If you’ve got small bookshelf speakers or satellite speakers, you still need a sub. If you’ve got a decent-sized set of floorstanding speakers that just don’t have quite enough oomph for the effects, then these might fill the gap.
Remember, they aren’t very ‘musical’. You do ‘hear’ them, through bone conduction, but it’s mostly that low-end ‘rumble’ that you get from these. But certainly the shakers will help you, because you can play the volume lower and still get that deep shaking bass. If you find the shaking transfers to the floor and hence to other rooms, you can put rubber isolation pads under the feet of your seating.
In short, if you like that deep, rumbling bass extension but can’t play your system loud enough to get it from your speaker system, these will help greatly.
lieu said:
What’s your budget? Be aware that the really tiny satellite/sub combinations almost always have a ‘hole’ in the lower midrange. The sub is only good for roughly 100-150 hz and below (the THX spec sets the crossover at 80 hz), and tiny satellites generally cut off quite a bit higher than that. Unfortunately, the lower midrange is where a lot of the energy in speaking voices lies, so for a home theater that’s a pretty serious compromise.
But if you can go up to a decent bookshelf or stand-mounted speaker rather than a tiny cube satellite, that problem goes away. I highly recommend Paradigm speakers for value. If you can afford it, the Studio/20 or Studio/40 speakers are reasonably sized and just gorgeous to listen to. The cheaper range monitor series speakers from Paradigm are also an excellent value. For the longest time I was using a pair of Paradigm Titans for my mains. They’re something like $299/pair, and they sounded great.
Some unsolicited tips for shopping for speakers:
Beware the audio tricks the salesmen will play on you. “Unplugged” CD’s tend to sound impressive because they don’t necessarily require great bass extension, and playing a 5.1 SACD will sound so much better than a regular CD that it will make the speakers sound good. Also, a lot of demos of small speakers are done ‘near field’, which makes them sound better than they will in your house. Bose is notorious for this. Their ‘demonstration kiosks’ mount the speakers a couple of feet from your head. They sound great that close, then you get them into your house and find that they just can’t fill the room and sound thin and reedy. As a side benefit, Bose displays are usually away from the rest of the speakers for sale, so you can’t do an A-B comparison.
Compare apples to apples. Don’t let the salesman use his own demo CD (sometimes the CD’s are actually specially tweaked and equalized to minimize the flaws in the speaker). Bring the music you like to listen to, and ask them to play it for you. Demo multiple sets of speakers in the same room, and make the audio guy lower the volume and raise it again between each switch (another old trick is to kick up the volume a bit when demoing the speakers you’re trying to sell - the brain tends to equate louder = better). Better yet, you control the volume. Move it up and down the range, and listen to the speakers at all level settings.
Also, the audio industry is full of more snake oil than any other industry I can think of. Don’t let the salesman upsell you into expensive cables, extended warranties, fancy isolation mounts, or any other frippery. The best speakers in the world will sound just as good connected with $2 worth of 12ga lamp cord than with $300 worth of oxygen/free super cable. At audio frequencies, wire is wire. There is *no difference. Don’t believe otherwise.
For interconnects, there’s no reason to ever spend more than $20-$30. Just get a good quality cable with solid connectors. For optical cable, it’s even less important. it’s transmitting a digital signal, and 1’s and 0’s don’t care.
The drummer in my mid-life crisis band is a record producer, specializing in conversions to 5.1 surround. He has worked with David Byrne and The Cure - he is working in converting Disintegration right now. I will ask him what he recommends.
Some that he has played for me - I am pretty sure he has NOT worked on them:
Deep Purple - Machine Head
Pink Floyd - Dark Side (as already mentioned)
Led Zeppelin - I can’t remember if it was How the West Was Won, but I think so - whatever it was, it was JUST AMAZING
Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
He has a couple hundred of them, so let me check…if you are interested, here is his website - it can play music when you link to it, so adjust your volume accordingly…
Sam, maybe around 5 or 6k for all the speakers. Thanks for the tips, I’ll give Paradigm a listen.
My friend’s response to my email:
Sweeeeeeeeeet. Tell him good luck and godspeed, I can’t wait to hear his work on that one. One of the best albums of all-time in my opinion.