Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds – Live At Radio
City (Blu-ray Set)
Picture:
B+ Sound: A- Extras: C Concert: B-
People
just love Dave Matthews and his Dave Matthews Band has been one of the most
commercially and critically successful acts in the troubled music business for
the last decade, which is no accident.
They have been about the music and whether you like their music or not,
their talent and musicianship is the reason for their success. It is not because they dance, lip-sync, walk
around half-dressed, tell people how much they hate other people, sing stupid
shallow music or act irresponsibly to impress the lowest common
denominator. Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds – Live At Radio City isolates the
leader of that band and the results are impressive.
Joined by
singer/songwriter/guitarist Tim Reynolds, who obviously deserves more exposure,
the duo delivers a very solid concert of the following songs:
1. Bartender
2. When The World Ends
3. Stay Or Leave
4. Save Me
5. Crush
6. So Damn Lucky
7. Gravedigger
8. The Maker
9. Old Dirt Hill
(Bring That Beat Back)
10. Eh Hee
11. Betrayal
12. Out Of My Hands
13. Still Water
14. Don't Drink The
Water
15. Oh
16. Cornbread
17. Crash Into Me
18. Down By The River
19. You Are My Sanity
20. Sister
21. Lie In Our
Graves
22. Some Devil
23. Grace Is Gone
24. Dancing Nancies
25. #41
26. Two Step
Even if
you don’t like all the songs, they are so good playing and performing
consistently so that it is impressive, even when you are not as involved in
said songs. But for concert and home
theater audiophiles, the set has additional benefits.
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image is easily one of the best we have yet
seen for an HD production and definitely a concert. Most previous concerts in Blu-ray and HD-DVD
have been from older HD sources (1080i, 720p) and the production has been
static and not very memorable. Here,
color is terrific and a step after what impressed us about Yes – Live At Montreux in the first place. With 9 HD cameras, a new approach that gives
the capturing of the show more life than the three camera set-ups that have
bored most of us to death by now, it still has the limits of the best HD but
knows how to make the format look good.
Then
there is the sound that I got carried away with when I first heard it. For previous concert releases in both HD
formats, the best we have had for audio was either DTS HD or PCM 5.1 mixes, but
this Blu-ray offers a Dolby TrueHD 5.1 96/24 mix that is a step above all
previous audio, finally offering the kind of true high definition sound the
all-audio DVD-Audio format and its MLP (Meridian Lossless Packing) format
delivered for multi-channel playback.
There is a decent PCM 48/24 5.1 mix and a passable Dolby Digital 5.1 mix
that sounds lame by comparison, but this is the kind of sound all the HD
concerts should be issued in. Warner did
Prince’s Purple Rain (see our HD-DVD
review on this site) feature film in Dolby TrueHD, but the dated, problematic
soundmaster’s flaws were only amplified.
There are
some compression issues and surround limits here and in the Yes title, but I
was so impressed just with the freer, more natural sound having more roomy
space on both discs that I rated them a bit higher than I should have at first. However, there is so much good going on with
the TrueHD here that I am sticking with my rating, using it as a new watermark
for how I encounter music sound in the HD formats and their new HD sound. Yes, this leans towards the front, but it is
good.
The two
extras included are a stills montage set to music and a 45+ minutes documentary
called So Damn Lucky about the talents and how this concert came to
be. With Dave Matthews & Time Reynolds – Live At Radio City, Sony/BMG Blu-ray
has set a new audiophile standard for HD concert presentations and we hope all
the other major record labels and other companies (Rhino, Eagle and Image)
follow suit. Hopefully, this is only the
beginning.
- Nicholas Sheffo
