Prince’s “Purple Rain” album is now available in Dolby Atmos streaming (Tidal, Amazon, Apple) to celebrate his 40th birthday.
A bluray edition with a Dolby Digital TrueHD Atmos track is scheduled for release before the end of the year.
Find the full review with CD, vinyl, streaming, Blu-ray (Dolby Atmos TrueHD) and One Step vinyl editions here (link).

Prince – Purple Rain – Tidal Dolby Atmos – 1984

Presentation

This is the Tidal Dolby Atmos presented in Dolby Digital Plus or AC-4 (link).

Below the spatialization for all tracks. Click on the images to zoom in.

Waveform and Spectrum: DR14 (Min: DR13, Max: DR15)

The waveform of the Tidal Atmos version downmixed in 7.1 shows good dynamics, as the graphs below confirm, with a dynamic range of at DR14.

The spectrogram of the Dolby Atmos track downmixed in stereo is limited to 20kHz. This limitation is due to Dolby Digital Plus encoding, which is a lossy encoder that limits bandwidth to optimize data size for a bit rate of 768 kbits/s.

Synthesis and listening

Very fine mixing work on this mythical album, perfectly exploiting the possibilities of space sound while respecting each track.
Right from the start of “Prince – Let’s Go Crazy”, the sound space is present with reverberation on the surround channels, then the music brings all its energy, and exploits all the channels, with sounds and also voices distributed in 3D space, with a finale on all the channels.
“The Beautiful Ones”: front vocals with music on all channels, including the presence of the high channels.
“Computer Blue”: extended soundstage with a lively mix on all channels.
“When Doves Cry”: use of different sound movements. The voice is on the front channels. The center channel is not used.
“Purple Rain”: starts on the stereo and quickly expands to all channels. Beautiful dynamics, with instruments distributed laterally and rearward. Listening in 9.1.4 brings even greater precision to the 180-degree front scene.

Rating:

• Dynamic: ●●●●o (4.5)
• Bandwidth: ●●●●o (4)
• Spatialization: ●●●●●●●ooo (7.2)
• Restitution: ●●●●o (4.0)

Sample : “When Doves Cry” 7.1 Dolby Atmos (Downmixed in 7.1) :

The sample is in 7.1 wav format, if you can not play the sample in your navigator, you can save it, right button menu and Save Audio As and play it with an external player.

For the album’s 40th anniversary, a fine job has been done with this Dolby Atmos mix. All that remains is to wait for the bluray version, which, with Dolby Digital TrueHD, will bring all the finesse of the Atmos mix to its lossless format.

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Dynamic Range measurements is shown below.

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Measurements

Dynamic Range comparaisons

Dynamic represents the ability to reproduce a wide range of sounds from the softest to the loudest. The target is to compare the dynamics of the music and not of the media (CD, digital files or vinyl).

For our 1 editions reviewed have obtained the following Dynamic Range (DR) :

	Prince – Purple Rain – Tidal Dolby Atmos – 2024
Global	DR14
Min	DR13
Max	DR15
1 – Prince – Let’s Go Crazy	DR13
2 – Prince – Take Me With U	DR14
3 – Prince – The Beautiful Ones	DR14
4 – Prince – Computer Blue	DR15
5 – Prince – Darling Nikki	DR14
6 – Prince – When Doves Cry	DR14
7 – Prince – I Would Die 4 U	DR14
8 – Prince – Baby I’m a Star	DR15
9 – Prince – Purple Rain	DR13

As a reminder, the scale goes from 0 to more 20, but the dynamics are considered good from 12, quite good between 10 and 11, and deteriorate below 10.

Detail of the ratings :

• Dynamic :
  1. Significant dynamic compression, DR less than 7
  2. Compression of the present dynamics, DR between 7 and 9.
  3. Correct piece DR >=10
  4. No dynamic compression (DR >12), dynamic rendering
  5. No dynamic compression, high DR and very dynamic sound rendering
• Spectrum :
  1. Spectrum cut and less than 15 khz
  2. Spectrum cut at 15 khz
  3. Spectrum not conforming to the original and cut (not HD) or original but limited bandwidth (but less than 20 kHz)
  4. Spectrum conforming to the original (but not HD)
  5. Spectrum conforming to the original with HD resolution (higher than 24kHz)
• Surface noise (only for vinyl):
  1. Continuous audible noise
  2. Audible surface noise except on passages with a high level of noise
  3. Reduced surface noise, barely audible on low level crossings
  4. Low surface noise, very good quality
  5. Very low surface noise, no defects, almost inaudible on the quiet passages (exceptional disc)
• Spatialization :
  • Between 0 and 5 for 5.1 or 7.1 channels configuration
  • Between 0 and 10 for Atmos configuration (7.1.4)
  • For more information on spatialization, you can read the article describing this parameter here.
• Restitution :
  1. Low quality of the restitution mixing dynamics, clarity, separation of voices and instruments.
  2. Average quality of the restitution mixing dynamics, clarity, separation of voices and instruments.
  3. Quality of the restitution mixing dynamics, clarity, separation of voices and instruments. Good record.
  4. High quality of the restitution mixing dynamics, clarity, separation of voices and instruments. Very high level disc.
  5. Maximum quality of the restitution mixing dynamics, clarity, separation of voices and instruments. Exceptional disc.

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