I bought the Limited Edition Goldfrapp Supernature CD/DVD set because I figured there would be enough on it to satisfy the rabid Goldfrapp fan. I wasn’t expecting much, as I had heard that it would have a documentary and an animation on it. Then they announced there would be a 5.1 mix of the album as well, but I really didn’t think much of it.
The documentary and the animation (basically an animated video for Fly Me Away) were decent, but that only really accounts for a bit more than 15 minutes of fun. What really impressed me though was the album portion of the DVD. This part includes three different audio tracks, an uncompressed LPCM stereo track, a 5.1 channel Dolby Digital mix and a 5.1 channel DTS mix.
Just the LPCM track is a bit better than the CD getting a bit more depth from being at 48khz, but what was really impressive was the DTS mix. I’ve heard lots of people rave about the quality of DTS sound for movie DVDs, but I really hadn’t noticed a significant difference before, other than a bit more dynamic range. And I ‘d also heard 5.1 mixes of album tracks, but they tended to be afterthoughts where they applied some echo to the rear channels and mixed only vocals to the center track, nothing really exceptional.
But the 5.1 DTS mix of Supernature is very impressive. The sound quality, dynamic range and depth is really quite amazing, and it’s clear that they actually did a real bottom up 5.1 mix of the album, not just some reprocessing of it after the fact. It might also have something to do with the bandwidth they gave it also. A typical DTS soundtrack for a movie tops out at around 768kbps. This mix is given 1536kbps to work with.
If you’ve got a 5.1 DTS system, I highly recommend the Limited Edition DVD of this album to give your ears a real treat.
Hey, I’ve bought the same copy of the CD as you. I have an iPod/iTunes and wanted to copy the CD on to my iTunes to listen to it without the disc, however, neither iTunes or Media Player recognise the CD disc and though Media Player recognises the DVD disc, it only recognises it in a DVD format and still will not let me copy the tracks off of it. I explored the folder itself and the ‘Audio’ file of the DVD disc is empty (even after ‘Show hidden files’), I don’t suppose you know how to access the music off either discs do you?
Liam
(http://livejournal.com/users/)
Liam, I assume you have the continental Europe version of Supernature and not the UK version. The Europe version comes with copy protection which will prevent you from copying the songs to your computer. The UK version of the CD does not contain any copy protection. I have heard that Mute UK have been exchanging to European version for the UK version for some people that are upset about it, so you might want to write to them about it. Or if possible you can take it back to the shop you bought it at and complain and ask for a working replacement. In my opinion, copy protection schemes do more to harm legitimate users than they do to stop piracy. In the past I’ve had some success being able to copy the songs using alternate CD rippers like CDex. This may or may not work depending on the protection scheme used.
(http://livejournal.com/users/jlick)