Chicago-Chicago V (DVD-Audio) (1972) (NTSC)

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Gallery-Photo DVD Credits
Rating
Year Of Production	1972
Running Time	51:26 (Case: 50)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	1,2,3,4,5,6	Directed By	James William Guercio
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Terry Kath Peter Cetera Robert Lamm Lee Loughnane Walter Parazaider James Pankow Daniel Seraphine
Case	?
RPI	$32.95	Music	Chicago

    In many ways, Chicago V is a transition album of sorts. Coming after the live album Chicago At Carnegie Hall (originally released on four LPs, and affectionately known as Chicago IV), this is the first Chicago album to fit onto a single LP.

    It features the maturity of Robert Lamm as a songwriter, as every song on the album was penned by him (apart from the last track Alma Mater by Terry Kath). From a musical perspective, the album links the older, more experimental/conceptual style of the band (featuring extended musical pieces, a strong horn section, and politically themed lyrics) to a taste of the band to come: shorter and more digestible songs, plus a tendency towards ballads and straight rock.

    The album was enormously popular when it was released (eventually becoming the first Chicago album to hit #1 in the charts), although there were a few critics complaining that the band had "sold out." Singles released included Dialogue as well as Saturday In The Park, the latter eventually becoming the most popular and well known song from the album.

    All songs on the album feature vocals as well as extended instrumental sections. The first track even features an excursion into atonal and free-form melodies, apparently as a homage to avant-garde French composer Edgard Varèse. The second (All Is Well) is a ballad that features tight harmonisation by the band's three lead singers - a style that eventually became the band's trademark.

     Dialogue (Part One) features a ping pong exchange between Terry Kath and Peter Cetera, and in Part Two the band harmonises. State Of The Union is another politically themed song, and Goodbye sounds quite jazzy.

    There is a bonus track available, which is a live recording of Dialogue.

Video

    Like most of the Warner DVD-Audio discs released to date, the video content on this disc is in full frame NTSC. Each song is accompanied by 4-5 photos of the band in action from the photo gallery.

    This is a single sided dual layered disc. All the DVD-Video content is contained on Layer 1, so I was unable to determine where the layer transition was.

Audio

    The DVD-Audio section is divided into two groups. Group 1 contains two audio tracks: English MLP 96/24 5.1 and English MLP 192/24 2.0. Group 2 is used for the animated menu transitions.

    There are two audio tracks on the DVD-Video section of the disc: English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) and English Dolby Digital 2.0 (448Kb/s). Both are encoded as audio tracks within Title 2.

    The MLP 5.1 audio track sounds excellent, if anything even nicer than Chicago II. The discrete surround mix (obviously taken from the original multi-track master tape) is highly immersive and enveloping, with the opening track (A Hit By Varèse) featuring an interesting pan of the guitars across all channels.

    Vocals are mixed to all front channels, but there are also instances of vocals mixed off-centre. In Dialogue (Part One), Terry's and Peter's vocals are mixed to both front and rear channels and sound eerily disembodied, as if I was listening on headphones with the two singers singing into my left and right ears.

    I noticed multiple instances of instruments being directed primarily towards the surround channels. Track 11 (Dialogue) is a live recording, and mainly features the band on front speakers, with audience noises and ambience in the surround channels.

    Don't bother listening to this track if you don't have a multi-channel speaker setup, as there are no fold-down coefficients for stereo playback.

    The high resolution audio track is extremely good at giving a nice 'punch' to the overall sound, providing additional detail and body to the cymbals, and even highlighting the jangly piano sound in Saturday In The Park.

    The MLP 2.0 track sounds even nicer, with additional presence on the cymbals and generally a slightly more "open" sound. At first, I wondered why the MLP 2.0 track sounded better, as the disc cover states that both tracks are mastered at 96/24 resolution. When I checked, I discovered that the disc content information is wrong (a disturbing trend for Warner releases, as the information for Chicago II was also wrong): the MLP 2.0 track is actually mastered at 192/24.

    Unfortunately, there is a rather severe authoring problem on the MLP 2.0 track on my review copy. An additional ten seconds of silence seems to have been prepended to the beginning of Track 3 (Now That You've Gone), plus an additional five seconds between Tracks 9 and 10, and a further five seconds between Tracks 10 and 11. The result is that the track boundaries from this point onwards do not correspond to the song boundaries. Normally, this would not be much of an issue, except my player often has an annoying habit of pausing between tracks, which means I get an annoying gap (lasting up to 1-2 seconds) between Tracks 3 and 4, as well as 6 and 7 about ten seconds before the end of the songs!

    To add insult to injury, the bonus Track 11 (as it starts about 20 seconds from the track boundary) is cut short 20 seconds before it finishes!

    Interestingly, I own a retail "R1" copy of this disc, purchased whilst I was in the US. The authoring error is not present on my retail copy, as all songs start at track boundaries. Both discs seem to have the same IFPI numbers (L907 for Layer 0, and L908 for Layer 1), however my review disc has inner ring numbers of 3 73842A.1A/B whereas the retail R1 disc has numbers of 3 73842V2.1.A/B. Therefore, if you encounter this problem, I suggest you check the inner ring numbers, return it and ask for another copy (which hopefully will not have the problem).

    The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is quite presentable, but loses the extra touch of realism (particularly in the cymbals) present in the MLP tracks. It is encoded with dialog normalization set to +4dB, so sounds quite loud. Likewise, the Dolby Digital 2.0 is a shadow of the MLP 2.0 track.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Extras are minimal on this disc. I would have liked to see at the very least song lyrics.

Menu

    Menus are full frame and static. There are some animated menu transitions (primarily in the DVD-Audio section of the disc).

Gallery-Photo

    This is a set of 44 (!) colour photographs of the band, presented in full frame. On the DVD-Audio section of the disc, these photos can only be viewed during album play, and only 4-5 per song.

DVD Credits

    This is a set of five stills providing original album and DVD-Audio production credits.

    This disc appears to be identically featured across all regions.

    Chicago V was one of Chicago's most successful albums, and marked their transition from a somewhat eclectic rock group into mega-stars. This DVD-Audio release features discrete multi-channel and remastered stereo versions of the album, plus a bonus track.

    Both MLP 5.1 and 2.0 audio tracks are reference quality, but there was an authoring problem with the MLP 2.0 track on my review copy.

    Extras are limited to a photo gallery.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall