Sundry Surround Sound Recordings

Planned Obsolescence

At the time of purchase in May 2015, my current universal (DTS/SACD/DVD-A/Blu-ray) player, a Pioneer BDP450, cost me a featherweight £159. Just over a year later it's "unavailable", unless I'm willing to settle for a refurbished model from Ebay. Reasonably priced multichannel DTS/SACD and DVD-Audio players are becoming really hard to find, even from the manufacturers who invented these formats. At present the best available options appear to be:

• PIONEER BDPLX58 (£449 at Richer Sounds)
• CAMBRIDGE CXU (£799.95)
• OPPO BDP105D (£1,099)
• PIONEER BDPLX88 (£1,099)

No wonder then that collectors of surround sound DVD-Audio recordings, and even more so those of multichannel DTS media or SACDs, are feeling increasingly under siege these days. For how much longer will we be able to play these purchases? How many more times will we be able to afford a new player, when the last one packs in and its perishing rubber wheels and belts and lasers can't be replaced?

This is a partial list of my surround sound recordings by format. It will let me sit and grieve as first DTS, then SACD, then DVD-A, and finally (sooner than you'd think!) Blu-ray playback become impossible. Then I will at least be able to see at a glance each month, exactly what fraction of my collection has now become permanently unavailable to me. It's also a work in progress, since I have no intention of losing the bad habit of buying these wonderful recordings; currently I'm looking forward to the much-delayed Steven Wilson remixes of the early Roxy Music albums.

Top 100+ Speciality Multichannel Studio Mixes

This first table lists recordings where a studio engineer (usually Steven Wilson or Jakko Jakszyk ;-) has carefully pored over the source material, and arranged things in space to produce a curated, meticulously arranged, surround sound experience.

Artist or Composer	Album Title	Year	Physical Media
			SACD	DVD‑A	Blu‑ray
Ian Anderson	Homo Erraticus	2014		✓
Bach	Bach Classics	17xx		✓
Bass Communion	Loss	2006		✓
The Beatles	Love	2006		✓
Beethoven	Beethoven Classics	18xx		✓
	Symphony No. 6 "Pastorale"	1808		✓
Blackfield	Blackfield V	2017			✓
David Bowie	The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust...	1972	✓
Caravan	In the Land of Grey and Pink	1971		✓
Eagles	Hotel California	1976		✓
	Hell Freezes Over	1994	✓
ELP	Tarkus	1971		✓
	Trilogy	1972		✓
	Brain Salad Surgery	1973		✓
Flaming Lips	Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots	2002		✓
Fleetwood Mac	Rumours	1977		✓
Genesis	Trespass	1970	✓	✓
	Nursery Cryme	1971	✓	✓
	Foxtrot	1972	✓	✓
	Selling England By The Pound	1973	✓	✓
	The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway	1974	✓	✓
	A Trick of the Tail	1976	✓	✓
	Wind & Wuthering		✓	✓
	...And Then There Were Three...	1978	✓	✓
	Duke	1980	✓	✓
	Abacab	1981	✓	✓
	Genesis	1983	✓	✓
	Invisible Touch	1986	✓	✓
	We Can't Dance	1991	✓	✓
Gentle Giant	Three Piece Suite	1970-2			✓
	Octopus	1972			✓
	The Power and the Glory	1974			✓
Handel	Handel's Water Garden	17xx		✓
Gavin Harrison	Cheating the Polygraph	2015		✓
Jethro Tull	Stand Up (The Elevated Edition)	1969		✓
	Benefit (A Collector's Edition)	1970		✓
	Aqualung	1971		✓
	Thick as a Brick	1972		✓
	A Passion Play	1973		✓
	War Child	1974		✓
	Minstrel in the Gallery	1975		✓
	Too Old to Rock'n'Roll: Too Young to Die!	1976		✓
	Songs from the Wood	1977		✓
	Heavy Horses	1978		✓
King Crimson	In the Court of the Crimson King	1969		✓
	In the Wake of Poseidon	1970		✓
	Lizard			✓
	Islands	1971		✓
	Larks' Tongues in Aspic	1973		✓
	Starless and Bible Black	1974		✓
	Red			✓
	Discipline	1981		✓
	Beat	1982		✓
	Three of a Perfect Pair	1984		✓
	THRAK	1995		✓
	Radical Action (To Unseat The Hold...)	2016			✓
Marillion	Misplaced Childhood	1985			✓
The Moody Blues	Days of Future Passed	1967	✓
	On the Threshold of a Dream	1969	✓
	To Our Children's Children's Children		✓
	Seventh Sojourn	1972	✓
Mozart	Mozart Classics	17xx		✓
Mike Oldfield	Tubular Bells	1973		✓
	Hergest Ridge	1974		✓
	Ommadawn	1975		✓
	Five Miles Out	1982		✓
Opeth	Still Life	1999		✓
	Deliverance & Damnation	2002/3		✓
	Watershed	2008		✓
	Heritage	2011		✓
Anthony Phillips	The Geese & the Ghost	1977		✓
	Wise After the Event	1978		✓
	Slow Dance	1990		✓
Pink Floyd	Atom Heart Mother (Devi/Ation, quad)	1970		✓	✓
	Echoes (Reverber/Ation, quad)	1971		✓	✓
	Meddle (Reverber/Ation, 5.1)	1971			✓
	The Dark Side of the Moon	1973		✓	✓
	Wish You Were Here	1975		✓	✓
Porcupine Tree	Stupid Dream	1999		✓
	Lightbulb Sun	2000		✓
	Deadwing (2 copies, 1 signed)	2005		✓
	Fear of a Blank Planet	2007		✓
	The Incident	2009		✓
Riverside	Love, Fear and the Time Machine	2015		✓
Roxy Music	Roxy Music	1972		✓
	Avalon	1982	✓
Schubert	Schubert Classics	18xx		✓
Simple Minds	New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)	1982		✓
	Sparkle in the Rain	1984		✓
	Once Upon a Time	1985		✓
Steely Dan	Gaucho	1980	✓
	Everything Must Go	2003		✓
T. Rex	Electric Warrior	1971	✓
Tchaikovsky	Tchaikovsky Classics	18xx		✓
	The Nutcracker	1892		✓
Tears for Fears	Songs from the Big Chair	1985			✓
Trondheim Solistene	Divertimenti	2008	✓		✓
	In Folk Style	2010	✓		✓
Rick Wakeman	The Six Wives of Henry VIII	1973		✓
	The Myths and Legends of King Arthur...	1975		✓
The Who	Tommy	1969	✓
	Quadrophenia	1973			✓
Steven Wilson	Insurgentes	2009		✓
	Grace for Drowning	2011			✓
	The Raven that Refused to Sing	2013		✓	✓
	Drive Home				✓
	Hand. Cannot. Erase.	2015		✓	✓
	4½	2016			✓
	To The Bone	2017		✓	✓
XTC	Drums and Wires	1979			✓
	Skylarking	1986			✓
	Oranges & Lemons	1989			✓
	Nonsuch	1992			✓
Yes	The Yes Album	1971		✓	✓
	Fragile (2002 - Rhino)			✓
	Fragile (2015 - Panegyric)			✓	✓
	Close to the Edge	1972		✓	✓
	Tales from Topographic Oceans	1973		✓	✓
	Relayer	1974		✓	✓

Notice that most of the Yes titles are double entries (in fact Fragile is a triple): the DVD-Audio and Blu-ray editions of these are of course equally essential.

The Loneliness of the Long Interval Musicologist

The Year column is problematic. Every recording has its place on multiple chronologies; for example, the life and development of its composer, its conductor, and its performing artist(s). The difficulty is that different performances naturally emphasise disparate chronologies, and a single date field in a table or database struggles to accommodate these variations.

For the historical study of musical development, the time stamp of primary interest is the date of composition. Sadly this is not recorded in typical media metadata, such as the ID3 tags on MP3 files. The "Year" recorded there represents the release date - when the particular edition was issued. Now, for most "popular" music (in the strict Amazon.com sense of "anything non-classical"), this is close enough to the date of composition; but for all of the recordings listed here, without exception, the release date for the multichannel edition is many years later than that of first publication of the original material, and the problem is only worse in the case of classical works.

Generally I've tried to get as close as possible to the date of composition. That means for popular works using the year of first issue, and for classical, the historical year (or century, for compilations) of composition. Still there remain intractable inconsistencies. For example, all of the material on the Beatles' "Love" album was recorded and issued long before Cirque du Soleil went shopping for a soundtrack in 2006. Finally, there's Daniel Barenboim. When the focus of a classical recording is neither composer nor performer, but instead a famous conductor, then I use the performance date.

Live Surround Sound Music Videos

This second table lists live video recordings of musical performances that just happen to have a surround sound component, often limited to a feeling of ambience in the hall where the recording was made. These are the second class citizens of the surround sound community, and this collection listing will be incomplete.

Artist or Composer	Album Title	Year	Physical Media
			DVD	Blu‑ray
Ash	Tokyo Blitz	2001	✓
Daniel Barenboim	Knowledge is the Beginning / The Ramallah Concert	2008	✓
	Neujahrskoncert 2009	2009	✓
	Europakonzert 10	2010		✓
	Mahler Symphony No. 9		✓
	The Salzburg Concerts	2011		✓
Blackfield	NYC - Blackfield Live In New York City	2007	✓
Dream Theater	Live at Budokan	2004	✓
	Score	2006	✓
David Gilmour	Remember That Night	2007	✓
Led Zeppelin	The Song Remains the Same	1999	✓
	Led Zeppelin	2003	✓
Opeth	Lamentations	2006	✓
	The Roundhouse Tapes	2007	✓
	Live at the Royal Albert Hall	2010	✓
Orphaned Land	The Road to Or Shalem	2011	✓
Porcupine Tree	Arriving Somewhere...	2006	✓
	Anesthetize	2010	✓	✓
Steven Wilson	Get All You Deserve	2012	✓	✓
Yes	Symphonic Live	2002	✓
	YesSpeak	2003	✓
	Acoustic	2004	✓
	Live at Montreux 2003	2007	✓
Youssou N'Dour	Live at Montreux 1989	2005	✓

I Voted for the Hugos!

And You Can Too!

SF (and by that I mean Science Fiction, quite tolerably with a latter day extension to include Fantasy, hence SF/F; but no, no indeed, not SciFi, and most assuredly, definitively, absolutely certainly, not SyFy) has always been an important part of my cultural life, and of the cultural lives of many of my friends. Ever since - depending upon your age and experience - the start, or the finish, of its golden age, namely the late 1950s and early 1960s. For that was when we bright and promising young future citizens were routinely winning school prizes such as Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship (1954, by John Almquist), or His Outpost in Space (1955, by James Duncan Lawrence); decades before it became politically incorrect to give out any kind of prize to anyone, for anything at all.

You might imagine, judging from these book titles, that Tom Swift was a kind of Harry Potter of his day, only with a somewhat more open-ended franchise. Well, no. The first book in series one was Tom Swift and his Motor Cycle; or, Fun and Adventure on the Road (1910); the last, in series 4 proper, Quantum Force (April 1993). By comparison, Potter is but an eye-blink in the geological epoch of Swift. But the "main sequence" of books all shared that familiar, SF genre-defining, characteristic of constrained speculation.

Subsequent schooldays supplied our spongiform minds with an apparently endless stream of this absorbing literature, whether Gollancz yellow jacket hardback from the school or local libraries, or pulp paperback from tobacconists, purveying Poul Anderson, James Blish (whom we discovered through his Star Trek script adaptations, but who then dazzled us like a doe in the road, with the last word in space opera - his sprawling, gutwrenching, Heinleinesque, eternity-spanning Cities In Flight quadrilogy), British supreme twistmeister John Brunner (who tragically died at the 1995 WorldCon event in my home town), L. Sprague de Camp, Harlan Ellison, Lester del Rey, Bob Shaw (remember Slow Glass?), Clifford D. Simak, or A. E. van Vogt.

Today, it is an almost unique privilege, to be able to read in the blog of one of the undisputed masters of SF, the nonagenarian Frederik Pohl, his reminiscences and firsthand personal memoirs and accounts of those other great enlighteners - those fearless imagineers - Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, E. E. "Doc" Smith, and still others. So the very fact alone, that Fred's website is up for a Hugo Award (Best Fan Writer) this year, would possibly have been enough to persuade me to part with the Aussiecon 4 Supporting Membership fee. As a member I'd be eligible, not only to vote in the final ballot of the 2010 Hugo Awards, but also to nominate in the 2011 Hugo Awards!

But Wait There's More

Now if enough isn't enough already, then note that Hugo winner John Scalzi, current SFWA President and creative consultant on TV's Stargate Universe, has recently been making a serious effort to get more people to vote, by personally persuading the many publishers involved to make available for download (only to voters), DRM-free, electronic copies of the nominated books. This year's is a truly bumper package, and the fact that it contains, amid much else, four full novels that I'd intended to buy anyway (oh! oh! oh! and a PDF of Batman: Whatever Happened to the Caped Crusader? written by Neil Gaiman, and illustrated by Andy Kubert and Scott Williams), pushed me over the edge with all the commitment of that van in Christopher Nolan's Inception.

Okay, so never mind that "the books balance". I'll probably end up buying these ones in dead tree format anyway, just as I still back up my music collection with dead plankton platters. Regardless...

Voting for the Hugo Awards means honouring both the genre and these great thinkers and writers, some of whose commitment and dedication to the public understanding of science rivals that of a Carl Sagan, Charles Simonyi, or Richard Dawkins. It advertises a contemporary interest in a viable SF/F scene outwith Hollywood. On the day when Amazon's ebook sales overtook their hardbacks, it carries the message that we still want to pay to keep this quality of writing alive. And we hope that it gives hope, stamina and encouragement, to the new torchbearers - Bear, Doctorow, Kowal, Miéville, Priest, Scalzi, Stephenson, Stross, Valente, and all the rest - thankfully, too numerous to enumerate!

At this self same time, voting for enlightened creativity, of the kind exemplified by the SF tradition, demonstrates our reluctant awareness of, and a longing for a life beyond, the electrochemical anaesthesia that today grips our children - exactly as it did the denizens of Arthur C. Clarke's The Lion of Comarre (1949). What do they know of their reality? It was thanks to SF alone that I left primary school, pre-teen, knowing already of such wonders as the predicate calculus, group theory, hypercomplex numbers, relativity and quantum electrodynamics; having met already the genius of Goldbach, de Fermat, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Galois, Frege, Gödel, Turing, Schrödinger, Heisenberg. My debts of gratitude for such enlightenment and liberation are incalculable, even in principle.

Now Get Off Your Ass

Hey: it's still July. The deadline for voting in this year’s final ballot is: 31 July 2010 23:59 PDT (Sunday, August 1, 2010 02:59 EDT, 06:59 UTC/GMT, 16:59 AEST). So don't leave it until the last minute. Because, well you see, that particular minute is after the deadline, for some odd reason. There's still time to get a supporting membership, complete with access to the Hugo Voter’s Packet, which admittedly you'll have to read rather quickly. And you can still vote - I did!

~

Update [5 Sep]: Fred Wins!

I just enjoyed a relaxing Scottish Sunday morning, following the 2010 Hugo Award Ceremony live from Melbourne via the Cover It Live text feed provided by Cheryl Morgan and Mur Lafferty, at the Melbourne auditorium; and Mary Robinette Kowal, joining in from Dragon*Con. Neil Gaiman was online contributing too, and cheering with everybody else when Fred won. It's like Wil Wheaton often says: I love living in the future! Only the near future, mind you. The live video feed was unwatchable.

Not all of my top choices won their categories. But enough did, and enough of the remaining categories were won by my second choices, that I have to say I'm personally convinced, as in sold, on the merits of the hypercomplex vote counting and recounting system that WorldCon and The Hugo Awards have evolved for this event.

And the main result, the award for best novel, was a two-way tie. What better way can there be to prove to people that their votes matter? Despite the forementioned complexities of that voting system, I can say with certainty that China Miéville would not have a Hugo Award today, were it not for my own, personal vote. Guy owes me a Guinness.

Photo of Elizabeth Anne Hull, Fred, the Hugo, and Steven Silver, by Cathy Pizarro

Corrections

Stop!

Listen up, people:

Take Me With U, not Let's Go Crazy.
Say Hello Wave Goodbye, not Tainted Love.
Northern Lights, not Harry Potter.
Prokofiev, not Rachmaninoff.
Arthur Schopenhauer, not Immanuel Kant.
Pie, not cake.

Okay, carry on.