Stone Temple Pilots - DVD Audio 24 bits_96Khz_5.1 Mix - Core.iso

This is an excellent audio transfer.

There are two DVD-Audio tracks, stereo and 5.1 surround both recorded in 96/24 resolution MLP. The DVD-V version was Dolby Digital 5.1 surround-encoded at the lower rate of 320 bps. It is not possible to switch 'on-the-fly' between any of these tracks. I listened to the whole album in 5.1 Advanced Resolution and then went through track by track listening to each version.

To my surprise, the increased resolution of DVD-A not only improved the quieter acoustic sections mentioned above, but also filled in some detail not apparent in some of the louder tracks such as some guitar melody in Plush. No Memory provided the greatest illustration of the sonic superiority of DVD-A with crisper, cleaner bass and fret-pulls. The stereo DVD-A was also very good and I thought the bass on this was smoother and more detailed than on the surround version. DVD-V players are also catered for well - the mix is basically the same as the DVD-A but a little coarser and in some ways, the increased bite of this lower resolution format gave an edge to the overdriven guitar of Dean DeLeo.

The dialogue was reasonably clear but one feature of the surround mix was to diffuse the vocals throughout the soundstage and occasionally to the surrounds making the vocals somewhat drowned out by the the rhythm tracks.

The surround channels were used in an interesting manner to diffuse the sound. As a result, the soundstage was confused and it was difficult to effectively localise the origin of a particular sound. I'm quite sure that this effect was intentional and in keeping with the genre of the music. There was some nice circle-type effects on the percussion intro of Naked Sunday.

The subwoofer nicely complemented the not insubstantial porting of bass to the front mains - this is not an ideal disc for your sub-sat system I'm afraid, unless you go digital for your player-processor interface and lose some of the detail of DVD-A.