DEADWING

Audio Quality

Rock music is not the easiest to judge on Audio Quality. Part of the allure of rock is the distortion inherent in the genre. Some may view the sound on this album as harsh or compressed.and in fact it is. But many associate those qualities with the Rock or Metal genre and this album should be viewed accordingly. While you may not be able to pick out each instrument, hear the singer's breath between words, or discern subtle changes in timbre and tone of an instrument or voice, you can still ascertain the quality of the audio by listening for specific events. The noise floor on the album was very low (not that you had many instances in which to evaluate it). At the beginning of the album, there are traffic sounds that were so realistic I actually stopped the disc to see who was making all that noise on my dead-end street. A couple of the tracks had an acoustic guitar section where you could clearly hear fingers sliding over the strings and the plastic on metal sound of the pick in action.

If you have a flabby, loose, sloppy, or slow sub, you may be in trouble with this album. Much of the bass is low and very, very fast (mostly from the kick drum though the bass did show up in a couple of songs). My Axiom EP500 was going freakin nuts during many of the songs. For much of the album, I felt like I was in an airplane - that much air was being moved. I kept expecting my ears to pop. I would seriously recommend this disc for anyone trying to evaluate the musicality of a subwoofer.

My only complaint is that the vocals seemed to blend into the music a little too much during specific songs. I believe this was by design and not in error. The singer's voice was often presented in a chorus format and tended to get lost behind some of the louder passages. When the vocals were solo (non- chorus), they rang thru as one would expect. My take on this is that the vocals were considered to be as much an instrument as a focal point in the song. Given the quality of the rest of the album, I have a hard time believing that something like this wasn't done purposefully. Is awesome!

So I give a 5.0 STARS!

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