Review of Ash: Tokyo Blitz

Introduction

Having seen Ash live a couple of times I was quite keen to see this DVD of one of there live concerts from there tour of Japan last year.

However for various reasons, most notably those of compatibility, I was a little disappointed with this DVD.

First off the disk appears to have all the hall marks of a reasonable little music DVD, good selection of tracks, Dolby Digital etc. etc. that it until you introduce the DVD to a player.

I had numerous problems with various players ranging from the menus loading but as soon as you selected anything the DVD stopped to sound dropouts and other problems. Eventually I tried it on my old Panasonic A360 and Power DVD and both are perfect, not a single problem. However I went though 5 different players to get a working combination.

The one thing that strikes me here is that this is a modern release that should have been tested against most if not all the common players available so how does this happen? I may have a duff disk but I doubt that a duff disk would be 100% ok on some players and have wide ranging problems on others. It`s not really very promising to see new titles with compatibility problem on established mainstream players.

Still, that`s my rant over so on with the review.

Video

The disk is presented in 4:3 full screen and non anamorphic 1.85:1 for the concert, considering that most of the footage is from a stage show or handy cam work it`s of a reasonable enough quality if very grainy.

The menus are nice if you like your bright colour fades and Ash clips ;-).

Audio

This DVD boasts 3 main audio tracks and stereo on all the extras.

Firstly a stereo track is provided of the concert and is fairly decent followed by another stereo track that claims to be a background `ambient` track; to me this sounds like Ash in a goldfish bowl :-).

To crown off the audio stakes we have a very pleasant Dolby 5.1 mix of the concert, whilst not ground breaking this sets a reasonable sound stage and is convincing enough.

Features

The extras are fairly substantial and are all of the `MTV` variety including short tours of Tokyo culture with the band.

There is also some background info on the before and after gig scene and some cringe worthy `Follow the fans` clips.

Conclusion

The contents of the DVD are in reality fairly reasonable and if you like Ash the music is great, if it was not for the compatibility problems I would rate the disk quite highly but unfortunately playback problems are going to bring the overall rating way down.