Neil Young – Harvest DVD-audio Review

DVD Release Date: 2nd December 2002

Run Time: 39 minutes

I have listened to this Neil Young surround re-master since it was out about 2-3 years ago. Now I found some leisure time to re-pick it up for a proper presentation here.

The DVD-Audio surround is great…but to my saddest disappointment, this album is a mistake.

Here, in particular, is the website where I found great discrepancy among reviewers.

http://www.digitalaudioguide.com/cgi-bin/review/music_reviewview.pl?category=rock&product=109

So, what’s wrong with this album? If you read carefully these reviews one by one, you’d found some completely devoted to their favorite artist with not a single doubt but some people just made very bad opposite sayings. I am emotionally leaning towards to say good words on Neil Young’s performance but at the same time I am very disappointed in this surround mix. The fact is, what I actually hear in this surround mix has something extra-ordinary. Neil Young is totally lost in the surround sound stage! All the instruments scatter around with no focus. You’d like to shut it down immediately because it is unbearable. I have been involved in the surround sound setting for quite a long time. I knew I needed to do something about it. So, I went around the 5 speakers and took some serious listening at a very near distance to each of the 5 channels. I found Neil Young’s voice came out from the center, rear left and rear right speakers and an idea immediately hit me. The front and rear channels are reversed! So I made a very simple experiment with the channels exchanged and bingo! That’s it. The first 4 tracks were mistaken with the front-rear reversal, somewhere at the surround encoding procedure while the rest of the album is quite OK. Now, the front soundstage and the surround sound fields…instrument placement and everything is all right. And you’d discovered that I have already put my own review attached to the end of the the above webpage.

CONCLUSION:

This DVD-Audio 5.1 mix must be re-issued again in order to correct the mistake. Never say no to your first impression and believe in your analytical ability. Critics help people to improve, not to bring them down. If you’ve got Surcode dts endcoder, go re-encode the first 4 tracks and recompile them to a new dts CD. This DVD-Audio is to be saved up when 100 years later your grandchildren would sell it at high price just like a mis-printed stamp.

2005/10/8

Epilogue: I just found out, after some careful audition 2 years later, track 6 and 7 are also reversed for the front-rear channels.

2005/10/15