Moody Blues SACD's on spincds.com

CD-Wow does not have the Deluxe Editions listed as SACD's anymore - just as CD's. I've gotten them already, but a friend wants them and is worried about getting just CD's. Anyone know anything??? Thanks...

 

I'm not sure they were ever listed as SACDs...I was confused when I initially checked them out from the coupon link (earlier in this thread) but was assured by a fellow forum member that all the Deluxe Editions contain the sacd layer. Only ISOTLC is stereo only rather than multichannel.

Good luck!

 

For Detroit area shoppers

Dearborn Music now has two Moody Blues SACD's in stock: To Our Chldren's Children's Children, and Days of Future Passed.

 

I think they were listed as SACD's. This was a copy of my receipt from CD-Wow 2 months ago

 

I love CD Universe too. Their shipping charges to Canada are super cheap for a big online retailer.

 

I knew there was some detailed discussion of the sound quality somewhere on the forum, but the thread title was misleading. Glad I finally found it.

I think I'm going to send my four unopened Moodies SACDs back to Amazon. My thoughts on the sound quality of AQOB exactly match those of Doctorwu and Jamie, even though I was listening to the 5.1 mix. The London CD sounds fantastic through my new NAD C542 cd player. By comparison, the SACD 5.1 (on my Sony 775) sounds very closed-in, muffled, and compressed, with poorer bass to boot.

Two examples.

"Question" on the London CD sounds h-u-g-e in soundstaging and dynamics. It actually has a more effective sense of depth than the 5.1 mix, to my ears. To be fair, I can hear more individual details in the 5.1 mix at times, but the NR and EQ and compression choices in the SACD make the experience much less involving.

"It's Up To You" sounds great on the London CD. The dynamics are very impressive, from the little palm-muted acoustic guitar beginning to that killer guitar riff that propels the song along. It's even witty: when the steel guitar comes in at the outset, the sound floats from left to right with just a little extra phasing or something to make it sound very animated and almost tactile. For the SACD 5.1, along with the general lifelessness that plagues the entire disc, the electric guitars sound muted and mixed down, and that fun little steel guitar moment just sits, inert, somewhere in between the front right and rear right speakers. The effect is "eh," while on the London CD the effect is "heh!"--not in terms of sound quality, but in terms of rhetorical effect.

I can't figure out why this would have happened. As I noted in a post on another thread, I went from listening to AQOB to listening to "Blow By Blow" in its 5.1 incarnation, and while I understand that these are two different recordings, I have to say that the Jeff Beck SACD sounded like a completely different format, and made AQOB sound even more airless and sonically compromised by comparison.

I was looking forward to these SACDs, and eager to experience the Moodies all over again, but now I'm resolved to get all the original London CDs if possible and get my 3D sound from their great soundstaging instead of from these new discs. No, AQOB is not terrible, but it's so far from living up to its promise, and so far from matching the experience of the London CD, that I'm just plain disappointed.

 

I borrowed a friends' copy of the A Question Of Balance sacd and played it (in 2 channel) for the first time today. I was very surprised and impressed with the sound quality and IMHO sounds far better than any previous version back to the vinyl and, maybe even better than that.

Looks like I'll be buying the MOODY titles I like now in sacd and really looking forward to becoming musically involved in them again. It's nice to come across some real winners once in a while specially when you don't expect to.

 

How do the SACD's sound in 5.1?

 

They're not. They're 4.0 because they used the original quad mixes. (Or maybe they mixed them to 4.1; can't remember).

I rarely listen on my surround system, but I sampled one or two of them. I thought they sounded pretty good. However, I'm not real familiar with these releases, so you should search other threads here. There was a monster one, where experts debated the SQ of the SACDs.

Doug