Chicago at Carnegie Hall: Complete
192/24 FLAC
In celebration of the 50th anniversary of Chicago's Carnegie Hall shows not only remastered the original album but released the complete recordings of all 8 shows.
I was very excited to see this as this was a landmark album of my teenage years and being able to get it in high res 192 FLAC format seemed like a great thing.
Unfortunately I the results were no where near what I had hoped for. I am not sure which songs from which songs went into the original release, but when I started listening to the first show something was immediately wrong. In spite of being a high res release the sound was just off instead of a nicely mixed concert recording it sounded more like a sound check tape that was just made to reference with a single mic. everything sounded kind of hollow and the lead vocal sounded like the singer was several feet away from the mic was placed in the soundstage in a way that made it sound as if it was coming from behind the rest of the band. It sounded more like and audience bootleg than a professionally recording from a major label.
I did not listen to the whole thing ( it's 14 1/2 hours long), but I did skim through a number of tracks and got the same feeling about all of them.
Just for reference I pulled up a Redbook version of the original album on Tidal and everything sounded as it should with the overall SQ being much more satisfying than the new 192 version.
Just goes to prove that "new and improved" does not always mean better.
Extremely disappointing, as I was really looking forward to this one.
