No secret in some of the forums I hang at that I'm a huge Beatle Geek.
Watched the John Lennon Legend DVD last night after adding it to my NetFlix queue and thought Id share some thoughts.
The Videos-Some are good some are so-so. There are some that IMO pay too much attention to Lennon's Murder and not enough about his life but thats just my opinion. There are a lot of rare pretty good quality clips though that give a glimpse of Lennon I'm sure some here have never seen. Call the videos a bonus as the real benefit of the DVD lies in sound quality.
It's also no secret I enjoy 5.1 surround sound so I ran this DVD through the tests. The DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 quite frankly were unimpressive. There was little use of rear channels and at first I was a bit disappointed. But when I switched to direct MultiChannel it was a whole new ballgame. Each distinct part of songs were clear and concise. Whatever Gets You Through the Night was never actually a favorite Lennon song of mine but with the multichannel the piano lines very much stood out as did the acoustic guitar. Generally I'm used to these sounds meld together and you cant really hear the distinct parts but with multichannel 5.1 it sounded very very good. Other things that stood out were Beautiful Boy. There are some background vocals that have some type of flange effect that sounded like it panned from the Rear Speakers to the Front Speakers. Once again something you would never notice with a regular CD. I'm not sure maybe if those weren't added specifically for the DVD or if they were there the whole time but it was very cool. Also the steel drum or timpani instruments really stood out as well. The other cool thing about the songs were they used studio master tapes for the DVD and they let them run a bit longer including some studio chatter as the song ended. In other words when your used to hearing a normal song end there was another 15 to 20 seconds of music.
All in all strictly based on sound quality in multichannel format the DVD would be well worth the purchase. Much like the Beatles Anthology DVDs are currently the best sounding cuts of Strawberry Fields, I'm the Walrus, and Day in the Life this is without question the best sounding source of the Lennon songs.
For the Videos I give a C+, for the 5.1 I give an A. Very surprised to hear just how good of job they did with this DVD. For those only with DTS or Dolby systems maybe worth the rent but for those with multichannel its a must buy.
