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 - Stunning music, but DVD fails to deliverWow! What a great box set! I immediately popped the DVD into the player. You can imagine my disappointment when, no matter what audio selection I make, all I get is regular 2 channel Stereo. Very upset. Rating:  - LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring The Complete RecordingsIf you read the reviews of the package they are all deservedly praising of this collection. I could add my voice to the crowd but I will only say this: get this if you love the movies and music already. It is well worth the high cost in my opinion. I strongly suggest you log into www.lordoftherings-soundtrack.com to download the companion Annotated Score. It is a beautiful track by track guide to the CD and free. I am so looking forward to the same packages for The Two Towers and The Return of the King. I hope they will be out soon; if anyone has release information please share it with us all. Rating: - Magnificant!Of course, I loved the Lord of the Rings films, and I am an avid classical music fan, yet I never really buy movie soundtracks...they just usually seem to be lacking. I remembered the music from The Fellowship of the Ring and was surprised to find this recording. I quibbled about spending $55 on this, but hey, that's the cost of the 3-disc classical set, so I thought why not. This work is utterly beautiful and just amazing - I am in love with it. I have listened to nothing else since I bought this three days ago. It is every bit worth the price and I cannot wait until The Two Towers and The Return of the King are released - let's hope. A lot has been said about the character vocals...I really don't mind them - they were written into the score afterall, and at those times, the focus is meant to be on the character vocals. I love the packaging...I think it's put together really well. However, my main quibble is the booklet. Yes, it is very informative, but I feel jipped a bit. Go to: http://www.lordoftherings-soundtrack.com/ and download the free annotated score - NOW THAT IS what should have been included here. It has MUCH more information and has all the choral texts - in the original middle-earth language and translated into English, so one can understand the text that is being sung. All in all, if you love great classical works, I can't recommend this enough. Beautiful, just beautiful. Rating: - Stunning....absolutely stunningI'm a musician, which means I'm pretty good at separating what is good and what is kitch, in terms of music. I've just finished listening to the DVD-Audio version of this soundtrack, and I am absolutely blown away. Firstly, for all the learned researchers out there who continue to muse about whether or not the human ear can actually hear the difference between the enhanced DVD-audio sound and CD-quality sound, I would like to say that yes, there is a difference, and yes, it can be heard. It can be heard in the same way that a good listener can hear the difference between the warmth of a vinyl album and the early sound of the original analogue-to-digital transfers that went into the first commercial CD's. I would ask you to do the following, if you are skeptical: place the DVD-audio version of this soundtrack in your computer (which is the only thing I have a 5.1 set of speakers attached to) and crank up the volume. If the hair on the back of your neck isn't on end after you've made it through the first few minutes of prologue, then you are dead. As for the music itself, I've never bought a soundtrack album in my life, previous to this. Most soundtracks are crap. This one is absolutely remarkable, even for the slight flaws that have crept into the production. Firstly, I don't actually agree all that much with the one reviewer who finds Ian McKellan singing near the beginning to be disconcerting. I DID find the sudden break between two pretty ominous passages, in order to hear hobbits singing, slightly jarring, but of course this IS a soundtrack following the movie narration, and it DOES actually make sense to create a small break between two heavy sections with a lighter passage. Secondly, there are spots when the DVD moves from one track to another where the audio "dies" and then returns as the music moves from track to track. And yeah, that's annoying after one has gotten immersed in the music and suddenly is confronted with the reality that this really is a facsimile of a musical performance, and not the performance itself. Otherwise, though, the sound quality here is extraordinary. I've heard the terms "pompous" and "bombastic" used to describe Shore's music, but this isn't really fair. The movies themselves are really just a modern interpretation of the Nibelungenlied and a few other Northern European sagas mixed in for good measure, so it makes perfect sense for the soundtrack to have a Wagnerian atmosphere to it. Well, I highly recommend this soundtrack. Rating: - Awesome, just awesomeCannot really put into words how great this is. Cannot wait for the versions for TT and ROTK to come out. Was not really a fan of the soundtrack in it's abridged form, here you get everything.
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