Search - Shahid Parvez & Akram Khan :: Sitar II

Not what I paid for

R. Hooper | 06/27/2007

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Before you tell yourself that I must be out of my mind, let me start by saying that the composition and performance of the music on this album deserves no less than five stars. Shahid Parvez is a master. As a mere mortal I am nowhere near qualified to comment on his music beyond relaying my awe and enthrallment.



DRM and compression are the problems with this album. The songs are recorded as 192kbps WMA files. Yes, that means that the songs are compressed down to run almost 1/4 of the bit rate that they should run on a CD. It's too bad that his producing label Sense World Music made no effort to do him justice with the release of this album. It further irritates me that Sense World Music make no mention of this being the case in their labeling/advertising of this album. Amazon also didn't label this as such, but I can understand that when the recording label doesn't.



I never would have purchased this album had I known either the compression or the DRM to be true. Sure, I'm an audiophile, and the audio quality is terrible, laden with artifacts and a distant sound quality severely lacking in the tonal bandwidth necessary for this kind of music. So of course this really irritates me when I try to play it on my multimedia system using either a high end stereo system or Sennheisers for output (there is no point to my usual FLAC rip to get the full CD quality with no full CD quality music to start with).



But I'm not completely compulsive, I do like to take advantage of lossy files from time to time, as well. However the WMA format of these songs prevent me from even doing that; e.g., they won't play in my older car's CD player and there is no good way for me to import the music into itunes, which means that there is no good way for me to load the music on my ipod. Sure, I know there are ways around this that involve burning the music to a CD-R or switching compression schemes. But why should I have to do the extra work? And why should I have to lose CD substrate longevity by switching to the manufactured CD's aluminum plate bit encoding to a CD-R's organic ink based bit encoding? Or lose additional audio quality by decompressing the music from its original compression scheme and introducing additional data loss by compressing it with another scheme?



Expensive coaster, little more. Get Sitar I and/or Synergy, instead, which are DRM and WMA-free."