Defective Bunnymen

I picked up a DVD of Echo and the Bunnymen Live in Liverpool yesterday. It is a concert film shot in August of 2001 with the current incarnation of the band performing at the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts. The concert is pretty much what you expect from the Bunnymen. Darkly lit with lots of smoke. Ian McCulloch sings a lot more in his lower register these days and only occasionally goes for the gusto/drama with the high notes. There are some cheesy video effects blending the concert footage with footage that was back projected at the gig and the editing is a bit too hyperactive to give you anything like a "you are there" feeling, but these are forgiveable errors.

The unforgiveable error is the Dolby Digital 5.1 sountrack. There was apparently some kind of error in the mixing-mastering-compressing-authoring chain, because the mix is extremely biased to the center channel. Only very faint sounds can be heard from the other speakers. I am not talking about a difference that could possible have been an aesthetic choice. I literally had to press my ear to my left and right front and surround speakers to hear anything at all. There is also a DTS mix that does not exhibit this problem. It's not the greatest surround mix. It's a bit bassy and kind of gimmicky with instruments sometimes playing exclusively in the surrounds, but it is probably what the mixer intended, unlike the DD5.1 track. There is also a DD2.0 track encoded at the 384kbps bitrate. This sounds a bit wonky, too, but again is at least within the realm of what someone might have intended.

Bonus features include 2 videos created from archival clips played to live versions of the songs "Crocodiles" and "Zimbo" and two more traditional music videos for studio recordings of newer songs "It's Alright" and "Make Me Shine". The DD5.1 tracks on the former two bonus tracks have the same problem as the concert recording. The DD5.1 tracks on the latter two videos sound like the same mix as the DTS track.

In short, if you do not have a DTS decoder, you will not be able to hear the 5.1 mix as the DD5.1 track is defective.

Regards,

 

There are definitely three distinct sound formats: DD 2.0 stereo (384 Kbps) DD5.1 (448 Kbps) and DTS (754Kbps). You can change them on the fly and/or select them from the disc's menu. If you manually turn on pro-logic decoding for the 2.0 mix, it doesn't sound great, but it sounds better than the DD5.1 mix.

Regards,