Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Place to find DVD-A and SACD titles

[Posted on AVS but thought I'd get suggestions here too.]

Can someone give some suggestions on places to find multichannel discs? I've tried several places suggested on these boards. I'm interested in a place that has a good search by genre. It's a pain to browse by title or artists. My tastes lean more toward the following:

-R&B (old school and contemporary)
-neo soul (Angie Stone, Musiq, India Arie, etc)
-Adult contemporary (Julia Fordham, Norah Jones, Amy Winehouse)

These seem to be the hardest for me to find. I'm sure it can be argued that my taste doesn't lend itself to taking advantage of multichannel, but to each his own. (I could argue that Insane Clown Posse shouldn't need multichannel...) I tried Best Buy, but their selection leaves a lot to be desired.

Here's some that I have so far but none are really that great. Suggestions are GREATLY welcome.

http://store.acousticsounds.com/
http://www.aixrecords.com/
http://www.dvdplanet.com/browse_sub...?categoryid=305
http://www.highfidelityreview.com/reviews/index.asp
http://www.elusivedisc.com/specials.asp
http://www.hiresmusic.com/homepage.html
http://www.amusicdirect.com/
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/574074/ref%3Dm%5Fhp%5Fr%5Fls%5F1%5F3/102-5477245-0955333
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/3330401/ref%3Dm%5Fhp%5Fr%5Fls%5F1%5F7/102-5477245-0955333

I can't give advice on where to find specifics that fit your tastes, but I can tell you that the three Aix discs I have are awesome. Unfortunately one is not my cup of tea musically (Fred Sokolow, not bad, just not exciting - purchased because I'm a sucker for Junior Brown who accompanies him on some of the tracks). But the classical piece (Mozart's Jupiter) and the many tracks on the free sampler DVD are really impressive.

The AIX albums were engineered specifically for 5.1 channel sound and it really shows. My impression is that Aix's standards are way higher than the norm right now, so it might be worth it to pick a few titles from their collection that intrigue you and give them a shot, especially since Hirez audio is still in the infancy stage where a) you can't get too many titles by artist and b) even when you can, they are sometimes more gimmickry than recording artistry. (I understand some of the Neil Young titles available are well recorded, if that interests you.) The AIX discs offer really cool features. I appreciate the DD and DTS 5.1 options, since I don't yet have a DVD-Audio player, nor do I plan to get one until prices have come down and titles ramped up. Another cool feature of the AIX discs is that on many you can choose between either a "stage" option that represents the immersive, close sound experience a musician has on stage OR "audience" mode in which the surrounds bring out the ambience of a venue from the best seats in the house.

If you want to get into the artistry of the recording, look into these. I'm going right now in fact to lie on my living room floor surrounded by Mozart.

fair enough, i'm game for taking a leap of faith. I got Hotel California last week at Best Buy as an impulse purchase. I know a few of the songs well, but never was into the Eagles enough to buy any albums. Only listened briefly and seems to be a nice transfer. My wife was shocked that I even bought it, she knows the whole album.

I'll try AIX, they can thank you for the plug!

http://store.acousticsounds.com/
http://www.aixrecords.com/
http://www.dvdplanet.com/browse_sub...?categoryid=305
http://www.highfidelityreview.com/reviews/index.asp
http://www.elusivedisc.com/specials.asp
http://www.hiresmusic.com/homepage.html
http://www.amusicdirect.com/
Amazon1
Amazon2

cool, thanks!

If you can handle the type of music, The Flamig Lips' new DVD-A of Yoshiimi Battles the Pink Robots is amazing.

The Flaming Lips are similar musically to Coldplay, just more techno sounds mixed in to give you an idea of what they sound like.

The DVD-A is incredibly aggressive with the sound mix, there are lots of extra material such as new songs, remixes of older songs and many videos as well as behind the scenes of videos.

And to top that all off, you get a second disc which is the original CD version playable on any CD player.

Easily the best release of a DVD-A yet. And easily shows the superiority of the format over SACD. Not that I do not like SACD. It is just that DVD-A has more potential as shown with this excellent release.

Even if you do not have DVD-A capabitlity, the DVD-V mix is still excellent fun to listen to.

Is there a loss of quality if my DVD player does not specifically support DVD-A? What are the differences?

Thanks

Yes, without a DVD-A player, you will only get Dolby Digital sound. You can still play all of the songs in Dolby 5.1 as well as any DVD-V based supplements.

DVD-A uses a new lossless format where there is no digital compression done to the music. You can only experience this ridiculously high resolution sound with a DVD-A player.