Release Date: May 01, 2008.
A Soundtrack For Daydreams.
This review is a bit of a departure from my usual coverage of video content as this is the first music-only release I’ve decided to evaluate. I feel that this release is important because it's an opportunity for the forum to read about the current state of high-resoluton audio. In this review, I compare the audible differences between PCM 16bit/44.1kHz CD to PCM 24bit/96kHz BD. This is the first of many future high resolution audio releases on the Blu-ray format.
Music was delivered on a higher resolution platform before. Putting the merits of vinyl aside, consumers recognized drawbacks of the compact disc. It propelled attempts to deliver higher resolution in the home with the creation of DVD-Audio or SACD as the replacement format. Both failed as there wasn’t enough support from the music industry for software and hardware manufacturers were split on support or even if to support it. If a new format is going to be created, logistically you need to stock the shelves with software that appeals to everyone, not just with obscure artists appealing to audiophiles because the recordings sound good. Remember, the music must be good too and must strike a chord with the general consumer.
While I was at Sony Pictures in 2004 as part of the Home Theater Forum meet, we were being showered with information about Blu-ray before it even hit the market. I had asked the question if Blu-ray could be in a position to replace the struggling DVD-A and SACD (and CD) and it was said that talks were in progress with the music industry regarding that. Fast forward to 2008 and with the HD disc format war over, Blu-ray has finally found itself in a position to possibly replace the CD with audio-only recordings. Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails appears to be the first of such releases.
For those of you not familiar with Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor has been one man behind the name as it worked its way into the alternative music scene. The landmark 1994 album The Downward Spiral helped push the industrial music genre into the mainstream and each album after showed a progression of the music rather than a repeat of things before. Today I would not classify the overall sound of Nine Inch Nails as industrial in any way.
Years ago I would have been hesitant in calling Nine Inch Nails a band. Trent Reznor created the ideas and played most of the instruments for all songs and even produced a few albums on his own. That isn’t to say there haven’t been some exceptions to this rule; when help was required to shape 1999’s The Fragile, Trent brought in producer Bob Ezrin who is most notable for working with Pink Floyd’s 1979 concept album, The Wall. For 2005’s With Teeth, Foo Fighters’ David Grohl did the drumming. These are only two of such examples. The talent line up during touring has changed throughout the years but Reznor has even included the contributions of some in studio works. This brings me to highlight Ghosts as one of those projects. Presented as Volumes I-IV and spread over two CDs or one Blu-ray disc, Ghosts is a perfect example of how an artist can progress and evolve sound and music over the years.
Ghosts I-IV is a 36-track instrumental album. The songs started as a vision of a place or situation, and from there created them using sounds, texture and melody. The songs are nameless, simply titled Ghosts 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. Reznor decided to do this because he didn’t want the song title to influence the images of the listener’s imagination when listening to the piece. Therefore, whatever visions the listener creates in their mind using the sounds presented in the track are entirely theirs. Taking this imagination a step further, Trent Reznor has created a Ghosts You Tube film festival for creative fans; listeners can create their own home/music videos for any track they want and post it in the festival where Reznor will evaluate and hand-pick the exceptional ones and present them back to fans. You can hear him speak of it here.
More specifically about the music of Ghosts, these are Reznor’s comments directly off of the Nine Inch Nails website (http://ghosts.nin.com/):
”This music arrived unexpectedly as the result of an experiment. The rules were as follows: 10 weeks, no clear agenda, no overthinking, everything driven by impulse. Whatever happens during that time gets released as... something.
“The team: Atticus Ross, Alan Moulder and myself with some help from Alessandro Cortini, Adrian Belew and Brian Viglione. Rob Sheridan collaborated with Artist in Residence (A+R) to create the accompanying visual and physical aesthetic.
“We began improvising and let the music decide the direction. Eyes were closed, hands played instruments and it began. Within a matter of days it became clear we were on to something, and a lot of material began appearing. What we thought could be a five song EP became much more. I invited some friends over to join in and we all enjoyed the process of collaborating on this.
“The end result is a wildly varied body of music that we're able to present to the world in ways the confines of a major record label would never have allowed - from a 100% DRM-free, high-quality download, to the most luxurious physical package we've ever created.
“More volumes of Ghosts are likely to appear in the future.
- Trent Reznor, March 2, 2008
Reznor goes on to explain, "I've been considering and wanting to make this kind of record for years, but by its very nature it wouldn't have made sense until this point. This collection of music is the result of working from a very visual perspective - dressing imagined locations and scenarios with sound and texture; a soundtrack for daydreams. I'm very pleased with the result and the ability to present it directly to you without interference. I hope you enjoy the first four volumes of Ghosts."
Ghosts is available on CD in the stores but the Blu-ray disc is currently available only through the website in the deluxe edition package. I was fortunate enough to find out about this quick enough to purchase the autographed ultra-deluxe limited edition. All 2500 copies of these were sold out within a day or so. I should also mention that Nine Inch Nails no longer has a contract with the record label. After 2007’s Year Zero and it's remix album Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D, Reznor has done everything without a meddling record company. Without this, as he says in the above quote, Ghosts probably would have never surfaced in its current form. After listening to the album consistently for a few weeks I can say that this is a great piece of work that stirs the imagination. After all, the instrumentals on Nine Inch Nails albums have always been amazing and the music itself lends itself to making pictures in the mind.
About the Blu-ray disc…
What makes Ghosts different than a few other BD audio-only releases is that it’s similar to a CD regarding final playback. You take the disc, put it in your BD player, and start playing without the need to have a video display (rather than starting automatically like a movie BD, I had to hit the “enter” or the "play" button on my Panasonic DMP-BD-10A, just as I would when starting a CD in a CD player. Other players may start it differently. There is also a video menu with HD stills as video content on this disc, should your video display be turned on.) The audio on the disc is 2 CHANNEL ONLY, and thank God for that! The disc uses pure 2-channel PCM with 24bit/96kHz resolution. There is no lossless encode/decode formats such as DTS-HDMA, and there is absolutely no reason to get that middleman in the way. This is, in fact, about as high-end a disc format can get. The material was created in PCM 24/96 and is delivered to you as such. What more could we want?
Some listeners may have been secretly wishing for a 5.1 surround mix. As much as I like surround sound for movies, I appreciate my music in 2-channel more. Besides, the sound quality of well designed two channel equipment far exceeds that of what any surround processor can deliver anyways, so in fact, the 2-channel version will always sound better. In addition to that, with the right recording techniques in place, the artist can deliver surround sound from a two channel setup as long as the user has their speaker system set up correctly and is sitting in the "sweet spot". I've enjoyed The Downward Spiral in "surround" well before any DVD-A or SACD multichannel mix. But I’m preaching to the choir on this forum so I’ll move on to how Ghosts I-IV sounds.
AUDIO QUALITY: 5/5 
I’m going to give it five stars – why wouldn’t I? It’s an absolutely amazing sounding collection of instrumentals. Trent Reznor has always put the effort in to deliver high quality sounding material. While albums of the past had such a multitude of tracks and needed to be compressed quite a bit, I feel there is a big relief when listening to Ghosts. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an album by what we can sort of classify as a “mainstream artist” that sounds so dynamic, so open, so unveiled, and so naked. Sounds float in the sound space so clearly I want to reach out and grab the instrument or electronic sound. This can be said for both the Blu-ray disc as well as the CD. There isn’t any glare, abrasiveness, or harness to the sound. Much of it sounds just as if I had the equipment used for the electronic sounds hooked right into my playback system. It sounds so raw and at the same time nicely polished.
The musical styles vary from track to track. The first track is quiet with Trent on the piano, but it is a very big piano sound as if I had my head right inside of it hearing all of the mechanisms of the piano striking and returning back to their original position. The natural instrument is then accompanied by electronic voice in an almost ghostly fashion; the use of higher tones suggesting something spiritual or an apparition. Of course, this is my mind's own vision while listening to the track. This continues through to Ghosts 2, but with the hitting of lower keys on the piano. The sound of the piano literally radiates throughout the room completely engulfing the listener. It’s mesmerizing.
Ghosts 3, 4 pick up the pace with a faster tempo. Ghosts 3 shares the sound of other Ghosts in that it sounds “cultural” (Middle Eastern, East Indian) and Ghosts 4 demonstrates the levels of dynamics this album delivers with loud sounds just cranked out cleanly above all others, with little sense of clipping or severe compression. I’d say that Ghosts 12 is one of my favourites out of Ghosts Volume I-II. It starts with a gentle piano piece that eventually has a duel with distorted percussion and guitar as they push each other aside, almost fighting to see which can stay at the front of the mix. Again, that’s how I interpret it and the point of this release is to imagine whatever we want.
Ghosts III-IV tends to pick up the pace a bit more and is somewhat different in style from the first two volumes. They are equally great and if I were to choose between volume as my favourite I’d have no idea. After a period of time, I did prefer listening to Volumes III-IV just a bit more, most likely because I found several tracks with a sound that mirrored events happening in my life. I could talk and talk about each piece but I'm not going to; that's not the point of this review. Let me not judge for you as I’m not going to write about every track. I’m going to encourage you to listen and imagine for yourself.
BD-CD Comparison & System Playback
This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for: how does a CD @ 16/44.1 sound in comparison to the same content on a BD at 24/96? Will there be a difference? Is there a large improvement? Is high resolution PCM worth the hype without all of this DSD or MLP baloney in between? The short answer is yes.
What I did is took the original Ghosts CD and played that back through my Meridian 508.24 CD player. It is connected with balanced outputs to an Ayre K-1xe, a dual-mono designed preamp. Each channel from the Ayre is connected balanced to one of two Theta Dreadnaughts operating as a monoblock (each Theta has the ability to switch off all of it’s channels except for the ones selected to operate in 2-channel mode, in my case only one of five 200w channels in each chassis is selected for this operation). The Ayre and Thetas are zero-feedback designs and all components are differential balanced from input to output. The speakers used are the Dunlavy SC-IV/A. The are highly regarded for their pinpoint accuracy, near-perfect measurements, flat response, time and phase accuracy and amazing revealing sound. …and revealing this test was!
The Blu-ray disc was played back in a Panasonic DMP-BD10A using unbalanced connections. The player represents the mediocre level of quality of what’s available to most consumers at this point in time, except for the Denon DVD-3800BDCI which uses higher quality DACs and internal components. I chose not to do this comparison of CD vs. BD entirely in the Panasonic because the Panasonic does not represent a good sounding CD player and the level of quality achievable from the format. It would be an injustice to the CD if done in this manner.
When volume matched, what is immediately clear is that the BD has a significantly lower noise floor. In fact the CD can’t even match it. The background of the BD is quieter, darker, and noiseless. The higher noise floor was audible when listening to the CD and its clear when making this comparison. We’ve been so used to it with every other recording that now, suddenly, it’s objectionable. Therefore quieter sounds became a bit more distinct, and it’s safe to say dynamic range excelled because of this.
Whether sitting in the sweet spot or standing outside of it, the sound of the BD is rounder around the edges of sounds. The CD sounds slightly brittle in comparison and the sounds feel less weighty. The midrange on the Blu-ray sounds more pleasing without being cloudy. The CD just doesn’t seem to have that extended resolution. Bass on both formats is respectable. The Blu-ray delivered just as much thump and definition as the CD did through the Meridian.
The area where the Blu-ray could not match was the dramatic presence of the CD. This is a hardware issue rather than a software one. All things aren’t equal in this comparison because the Meridian player is a much better audio component then the Panasonic is, but at the same time shows exactly what the CD format is capable of. The Meridian is designed to sound accurate and is exceptional in this regard. Therefore the soundstage felt bigger and more dramatic as the Meridian squeezed out as much of the 16bit res as it could from the CD. It's this that makes the sound impressive and holier than the Blu-ray. Can Blu-ray software deliver the same? Most certainly, but not until the hardware gets better as there is no high end Blu-ray equipment on the market that can squeeze out as much 24/96 resolution possible. I wouldn't even think the machine is outputting close to that. It’s quite possible that when BD Profile 3.0 hits the market (the audio-only profile for BD), this may change. I’m eager to hear a fully balanced BD audio only player that is put together with the highest quality parts. Then we can really hear what the format can truly deliver (when the market grows, I’m sure external DACs are also possible and would be linked to a BD transport via HDMI). I expect it to knock me out of my chair.
If you use your Blu-ray or DVD player as a CD player, or use a mass market CD player as your main listening source, the Blu-ray disc will be the better choice over the CD. If your CD player is of much higher calibre, at this poing in time the choice is bit more difficult to make despite the advantages of Blu-ray software; it may depend on the performance of your CD player regardless of price point, because as we know, not all high-priced gear translates to better sound quality. In my case, the $3500 Meridian is an excellent performer and the $500 BD player had a lot of challenges to face from it. Remember, it's a hardware and *NOT* a software issue.
Regardless of the differences, both formats did an exceptional job delivering the music because of the high quality recording. The better the original recording, the better it will sound on any physical media.
IN THE END...
Ghosts I-IV is an imaginative piece of work. Nine Inch Nails used the freedom from the record label to create work that would have otherwise never surfaced, and Nine Inch Nails has also given fans the freedom and creativity to create films of the music and post them on the official website. The music is brain food to listen to and is not some uncreative mish-mash of sound; in fact I’ve been enjoying listening to it on my drives to work and back everyday. Has it helped me daydream more? You bet. But what is really exceptional here is that once again, Trent Reznor has delivered his material in a high resolution format and has offered audiophiles and fans the chance to hear the music exactly as he hears it from the 24/96 master. In the past he’s dabbled with DVD-Audio and SACD, and his newest album, The Slip, also has a downloadable 24/96 WAVE version available. Concluding, I will say thank you Trent for creating exceptional and meaningful music and for taking the time and care of delivering it to us with the highest quality possible.
Michael Osadciw
May 11, 2008.
Review System
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