Here is yet another guy with great surround mixing skills! Enter Chuck Ainley. He's the guy credited with the mix on the new DVD-Audio release of Mark Knopfler's "Sailing To Philadelphia". The former Dire Straits guitarist is well served. A couple of the tracks are of reference quality: "What It Is", with its celtic influences, and "Sailing To Philadelphia", with its James Taylor duet, are impressive. On these two tracks, the surrounds are quite strong but don't suffer from drawing attention to themselves. The result is glorious room-filling music!
The rest of the tracks sound pretty good, too, although not quite as impressive. Some have the surrounds mixed a little bit more discretely. Usually, it's light percussion and other instrumentation that still sounds quite nice. In fact, the only thing I question is whether it was necessary to put a lone harmonica in the rear left channel at the beginning of "Baloney Again". Other than that, it's pretty decent. Vocals on all tracks tend to be primarily in the front left/right channels, and I like that! Moreover, the recording quality is pretty good for 48 kHz / 24 Bit. (For those interested in the Stereo tracks, the recording was encoded at 88.2 kHz / 24 Bit PPCM.)
The DVD-Audio version of "Sailing to Philadelphia" is actually part of a 2-disc deluxe set. The first disc a regular CD and the second disc the DVD. Bonus material includes a documentary with Mark Knopfler.
