Post Description

For ‘Songs for Survivors’ his fifth solo project and his first since 1986, Nash moves back towards his English musical roots, although the album’s strongest influences are undoubtedly country and rock. The disc, released by DTS Entertainment is upbeat, quite unlike the mournful ‘Wild Tales’ or the tree-hugging ‘Earth Sky’, and is full of Nash trademark vocals, always up-front and always emotive. It is also almost completely devoid of obvious synthesised elements, Nash has obviously learnt his lesson with the critical and commercial disaster that was ‘Innocent Eyes’. Having not enjoyed the most revered solo career, it’s therefore apt that the title of this album should be influenced by his first go-it-alone work, Nash is no longer a ‘beginner’, now he is a ‘survivor’.

Some have said that they miss David Crosby’s vocal harmonies, but he does contribute and in my opinion, since this is a Nash solo album it’s actually a good thing that Crosby is not to the fore, a move that would soften the focus on Nash’s own talents. Even after all this time – Nash is only a few years away from drawing a retirement pension – his voice retains much of its original breathy and at times husky character. Other disc collaborators include a number of venerable Californian instrumentalists, including Russell Kunkel (drums, percussion), Dan Dugmore (pedal steel, acoustic and electric guitars, banjo), Matt Rollings (keyboards), Steve Farris (acoustic and electric guitars), Lenny Castro (percussion) and Victor Krauss (acoustic and electric bass).

‘Songs for Survivors’ was recorded in October 2000, which makes me wonder why it was almost eighteen months before it saw the light of day in any format, especially when this is the strongest Nash disc in recent memory. The song writing is back on form and all the musical performances are first rate. Both on the disc and within the accompanying inlay card DTS go to great pains to describe the recording techniques and hardware used, right down to a list detailing which microphone was used to capture a particular instrument. “The album was recorded directly to hard disc using dB Technologies analog to digital converters. All signals were recorded through class A discreet analog circuitry and always bypassed as many stages of amplification as possible.” Aside from the “discreet” circuitry (far preferable to injudicious circuits in my experience), the recording “…also employed Cello and Wireworld high resolution audio cables…”, quite unlike most recordings that use low resolution wire?

This DVD-Audio title offers an unusual selection of audio formats from which to choose. There’s a loss-less 3/2.1 Meridian Lossless Packing track at 48kHz 24-bit, a 1,509.75kb/s lossy DTS 3/2.1 mix (something DTS still erroneously describe as “master quality” in the face of MLP) and a dedicated 48kHz two-channel PCM mix. For those playing the disc in a PC or MAC computer, there is also an MPEG-Audio option, which to me, only serves to illustrate the extraordinary measures DTS Entertainment will take in order to avoid the use of any obvious Dolby technologies on one of their discs.

The album begins with ‘Dirty Little Secret’, an up-beat rhythmic track, and it’s instantly apparent that DTS have pulled out all the stops in order to produce a disc of outstanding fidelity and one with an artistic, lively and engaging surround mix. Nash’s lead vocals are reproduced by a hard centre component, while the overdubbed vocals of the chorus are spread around to the sides of the room. The surrounds convey a number of obvious panning effects although generally they’re not aggressive enough to be distracting, while the LFE channel delivers a goodly amount of bass grunt.

The opening song sets the tone for the mixing convention used during the remainder of the album, the recurring theme being Nash hard centre, backing vocals along the sides of the room and the musicians spread naturally throughout a deep and expansive soundstage. A number of tracks, ‘Blizzard of Lies’ for example, have obvious country music influences where harmonica – played by Nash – sits alongside steel and acoustic guitars, a mixture of instrument textures that would pose quite a challenge for any recording engineer, yet this disc delivers all elements flawlessly. Percussion and drums are uncannily lifelike and without any raw edges, while each guitar retains its own sense of individuality and space regardless of the complexity of the mix.

‘The Chelsea Hotel’ opens with a beautifully sharp, acoustic guitar completely free of any fingering noise and that same guitar can be discerned throughout the track, even with a fair number of additional instruments all playing along. The only downside to this particular cut is a strong, processed electric guitar positioned towards the rear of the room that can become a little disconcerting at times. But as is the case with the entire MLP layer, the bass of this track really catches the ear; it is never overpowering but possesses real weight and a bite with almost tactile qualities.

The only other distracting elements are the toms of ‘I’ll Be There For You’ which also suffers a little from a loud vocal presence in the surround channels, but your mileage may vary, especially as I’m really struggling to be critical of any particular aspect of the DVD-Audio layer.

‘I’ll Be There For You’ is actually a really strong composition with engaging lyrics, but the best is still to come. Move past the gentler ‘Nothing in the World’ and the jazz/blues ‘Where Love Lies Tonight’ and up pops ‘Pavanne’, a song that really does paint a picture with words. It’s all about an elegant but icy female assassin who never misses her target, whether he is in a casino or presidential palace. The lyrics might be a metaphor for some man-eating woman Nash has encountered and if so, the cold-hearted femme fatal inspiration is matched by forward, sharp acoustic guitars accompanying the smoky vocals.

A short song entitled ‘Come With Me’ closes the disc, it’s a simple, rather childlike work but once again with an outstanding mixture of piercing harmonica and grumbling bass countered by harmonised lyrics, yet the real standout track is ‘Liar’s Nightmare’, all eight minutes of it. The lyrics have a repetitive stop/start rhymed theme but are accompanied by complex and intricate guitar passages, deep menacing bass and forceful, punchy dynamic segments, each one ramming home a particular line or phrase. There’s some debate about the inspiration for the words, but it seems Nash is reminiscing about mistakes, lies and misunderstandings that have gone before. “I said everything’s shaking, including myself, I keep all my feelings high up on a shelf. And I can’t seem to reach them but I know they were there, I’m trapped in this vacuum and I’m gasping for air… I gotta tell you the truth about the sadness I find, I have opened my heart to you, and I hope you don’t mind.” Not at all Graham.

The surround mix is so good and the MLP fidelity so vibrant that it’s criminal to listen to the two-channel alternative, but if you really must then it just shades out the CD version by a gnat’s whisker, there is a tad more dynamic range. Yet to really enjoy this album it has to be replayed in one of the 3/2.1 formats.

Comparing the lossless MLP track to the lossy DTS is fraught with dangers from both subjective and technical standpoints, but judged on as even a playing field as possible, I felt that the DTS presentation wasn’t as balanced, either tonally or in terms of instrument positioning within the soundstage as the MLP alternative. I also felt that the DTS track suffered from a fair amount of bass bloat and the LFE was a good deal louder (uh-oh). Time to break out a few analysis tools…

The first thing to do was find a DVD-Audio player with an internal DTS decoder, then make sure that all the integral bass management was defeated (ie. all channels run full-range without crossovers for both formats), that all output levels were set to unity gain (ie. 0dB) and that all channels had equal time alignment values, in my case 0ms. The analogue outputs of the player were then fed into a high-end 24-bit 96kHz A/D converter and sent to a Windows PC via S/P-DIF. The track I chose to analyse was ‘Dirty Little Secret’, largely because there’s so much going on and all channels are active throughout.

I then set about capturing four instances of the entire track; one each for the MLP LFE channel, MLP centre channel, MLP front left channel and MLP rear left channel. The whole exercise was then repeated using the DTS track, so what I ended up with was eight individual files. This enabled me to compare relative levels – the rear left to the front left and centre to LFE for example – and the same channel across formats.

To cut a long story short, the experiment highlighted a number of fundamental differences between the DTS and MLP 3/2.1 mixes on the disc. Perhaps the most important