Gentle Giant "Three Piece Suite" — Steven Wilson Mixes

The songs from Gentle Giant and Acquiring The Taste sound VERY good. Nice clarity and separation and the remixes give them a new life. The House, The Street, The Room and Nothing At All sound better than ever IMHO. Although they sound also very good, I don`t like the remixes of the songs from Three Friends as much, specially Schooldays and Mr. Class And Quality for which I still prefer the original version.

If you have surround, you have to listen to Nothing At All...stunning !!

Overall great job. A must release for all Gentle Giant fans I think. Now if they can only find the multitracks from In A Glass House...

 

Amazon UK shipped fast, and even gave some refund (lowest price guarantee).
Blu ray surround sounds great. What else is new? Mr. Wilson knows what he is doing. I don't expect any split opinions in this thread.

 

Cool to have those 24/96 flat transfers of the first three. Ripped 'em from the BD last night, converted to flac and uploaded to my music server. They sound good.

 

So, just got my copy from Burning Shed today. I'm thinking this is up there with TFTO as the best Prog remaster ever.

1. Sure, some of the tracks are missing, but it's got 60% of three really good albums.

2. It has flat hirez transfers of all three albums, which is a pleasant surprise. In this age of limited shelf space, I'm going to have to figure out if I need to keep the CDs. Probably, no.

3. Even though I ripped it immediately, since the other GG releases have it, I decided to drop the Bluray into the Oppo anyway to see if there is video. There is. I now know that I never understood the lyrics properly, and I know I don't know what they meant. "Dead Before Playing" is the chorus. Who knew?

 

Remix, maybe?

 

Actually, as much as I enjoyed this set, I think SW emphasized the bass on "Giant" WAY too much. It's just so loud that I was considering turning off my subwoofer. I wanted to turn the music up louder but really couldn't because the bass was already so strong.

The rest of the tracks seem to handle the bass a little more tastefully, but only by just enough.

My impression at least for the tracks on the first 2 albums is that SW wasn't terribly concerned with sounding like the original mixes and instead had fun with pulling out elements that weren't previously obvious. For whatever reason though, this does not apply to the songs from the Three Friends album -- they seem pretty close to what we know already.

One nice thing is that "Peel the Paint" no longer suffers from an issue where the drum and guitar middle section is brighter than the rest of the track; SW blended it nicely here.

 

Does anyone know if the master tapes for the live album, Playing the Fool, are still available? Just curious. . .

 

The mix down masters or the multitracks? The latter would be a great project for SW to tackle! Unfortunately I don't know the answer. Paging @Plan9!

 

No, it didn't. Nothing on this is remastered. Nothing is being mastered again.

For the zillionth time, "remaster" refers to something that has previously been released and mastered and is being mastered again (remastered) for release. These mixes are new and have never been released before in any form. They are certainly not being remastered now. The flat transfers are flat transfers and by definition are not mastered.

A new remix can't be remastered until it has been mastered. One can't remaster something for its first release. That makes no sense.

*Steven Wilson releases sometimes are unmastered or are at least are not mastered by someone else. That is, he remixes them to his satisfaction and they are released without any further mastering.

I had thought that I was imagining that a lot of Steven Wilson remixes make my subwoofer boom extremely loudly but your post makes me realise that it is happening. I've never been crazy about really loud bass. I'd prefer it if he toned it down a little but I can balance it out by reducing the sub volume. That usually makes it a bit low for everything else though.

 

The multis are at least partially available I guess, but I don't know if SW would be interested in mixing an entire GG live album. I'm not aware of any plans concerning this.

 

I'll try to take a moment to check out this strong bass concern.

 

It has never been a concern here on any of his 5.1 remixes. First complaint that I can remember. Maybe a setup issue. Possibly sub doing double duty. The dot one channel and managed bass for smaller mains and/or rears.

 

In my case, it's never been a concern for his other mixes, but most certainly was on this one. I mean the stereo mix specifically as I don't currently have a 5.1 setup. Again, it was way too much bass on "Giant" and possibly the other songs from the first album. I do know that it was much better by the time the Three Friends tracks came on though and I could boost the volume a little more.

Sure, I could just turn down the volume on my sub, but I'm either too lazy or obsessive, because once I get it to that sweet spot that works wonders for most everything, I don't really want to touch it and have to worry about getting it back to that exact point again.

Ok, maybe that's both lazy AND obsessive.

 

I rarely listen to his 2.0 mixes because his multichannel is so good. I just threw on the stereo mix and it sounds pretty balanced. I can't go balls out atm though. This music is underrated.

 

Balls out is the only way for me!

You're absolutely right about it being underrated - as much as it seems that more and more people are discovering Gentle Giant even today, they deserve even more credit than they get.

 

I finally listed to everything (except the instruments tracks thus far) and it is a really nice set. I think the Peel the Paint video is the highlight of the set. Very well done!

 

Hmmm...I'll have a look at that. I thought I tricked my amp into treating the speakers as large ones but it may have reset.

 

Anyone having a problem extracting the audio for Giant (SW Mix) from the Blu Ray?

DVD Audio Extractor is giving me an error on that track.

 

No problem here. I'm using it on Mac.

 

No problem either. PC.

 

Thanks. Another pass with MakeMKV and it extracts fine now.

 

This release has been all win, a real pleasant surprise for me!

 

Not a lot new here and could have been synced better but FWIW.

 

Guess its the Skype thinghy that lags, hard to sync... but very irritating to watch
Its like watching a giant from below

Interesting that he mention the multitracks for the first album
but nothing if they will use them