BlU-RAy RevIews

Love him or hate him, Alice Cooper wrote some great tunes, and they’re all now in hires. Also in hi-res is some old Marvin Gaye… and the sound’s so impressive we wondered what’s going on?

In a recent interview James Randi, the magician and sceptic, spoke of how he travelled for a year with Alice Cooper in the early 70s. He developed the guillotine and many of the other effects for the show. He revealed how, at one point, the band’s manager Shep Gordon was horrified: the Mayor of Baltimore had offered the keys to the city to Alice Cooper. The last thing they wanted was respectability. They needed ‘the parents’ to hate them.

I was oblivious to all that. A friend of mine introduced me to high fidelity and Alice Cooper at the same time — Killer was our favourite — and I knew nothing of transgression or rebellion. I just loved the music. Has there ever been a better constructed ballad than Desperado? And in Dead Babies, Halo of Flies, and Killer, there’s a musical sophistication at odds with the subject matter and titles. Cooper was being decapitated all over the world thanks to Randi’s illusions, while I was gaining a musical education.

Super Duper Alice Cooper is focused about equally on the showman, on the man, and on the music. Inevitably the band (the name referred to both the man and the band up to and including Muscle of Love) is also big in the early part of this documentary.

Made by Sam Dunn and some of his collaborators on ‘Metal Evolution’, it consists entirely of period footage, old photos turned into diorama-style 3D and scenes from the 1920 silent flick, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

It is wonderfully effective, with accompaniment by lyrically appropriate songs from the Cooper catalogue.

If you’re interested in the material in this documentary, you’ll want to avail yourself of the 21 minutes of deleted scenes.

And even if you’re not interested in Alice Cooper as such, the evocation of the time and place — LA as the 60s approached then became the 70s, and the struggle of bands to succeed — is engrossing. Spoiler alert: Alice Cooper failed… but then found a home in Detroit.

The picture is delivered at the regular Blu-ray 1080p24 with a generous bit rate and in a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, filling most of a regular screen. You get a choice of 24-bit stereo LPCM or 24-bit DTS-HD MA 5.1 (both at 48kHz), and they’ve done a decent job in making some surround out of inherently two-channel material. The core of the DTS-HD is DTS at the half-bitrate 768kbps.

Marvin Gaye was another of those hard-working Motown singers, pumping out album after album through the 1960s. Towards the end of the decade he was depressed by the illness of a singing partner, and of being under the thumb of the studio, so he insisted on artistic control of this, his eleventh studio album, and produced one of the greats in period soul and R&B.

The music delivery is in three forms of stereo, from which you may choose according to your preference. All are 24-bit/96k, but the formats are LPCM, DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD. I was a little surprised by the bitrates. Typically DTS-HD MA requires more bits for a given bit of audio than Dolby TrueHD since the latter is slightly more efficient (although on Blu-ray its efficiency is squandered due to the need to embed a backwards-compatible Dolby Digital stream). With this disc, the TrueHD track had a significantly higher bit rate than the DTS-HD track. I have tools to rip LPCM and TrueHD, but unfortunately none for DTS-HD MA. I would have loved to examine its contents closely.

The frequency spectrum (I examined the LPCM version) of these tracks induced puzzlement in me. For each and every track, and at every point I cared to sample, there was the kind of HF extension you’d expect to see if the music were recorded today using high quality 96kHz digital sampling. There’s a smooth reduction in output level from around 15kHz all the way up to 44kHz. It’s impressive indeed!

But studio recorders didn’t capture that kind of high-end back in 1971, much as we would have liked them to. Did Universal employ some kind of enhancement, perhaps regenerating high frequency harmonics that might have been presumed to exist in the original? Hard to tell. That’s always going to be a puzzle with high definition re-releases of older material.

Even if there were any kind of shenanigans with HF processing, the audible results are impressive. Mostly the recording is clean and smooth, although not remarkably ‘natural’. Clearly there has been lots of layering of different audio elements. Sometimes this results in tape hiss at noticeable levels, such as during the reprise of What’s Going On? at the end of the disc. The version of the same song which opens the disc is a touch crunchy, with a little distortion and breakup on Gaye’s voice.

I’d hazard a guess that any complaints here apply as much to the original source tapes as to this representation of them.

For the most part though, the presentation is every bit as smooth as the music itself.