With Teeth Impressions - Content

I've had Trent's new album for a week now, so I thought I'd throw out my feelings on the disc so far.

I'll first comment about the content of the disc. Originally Trent had planned on having elaborate packaging, but the record company scrapped the idea, so we were left with nothing. All that's inside the package are the song titles. If you go to the With Teeth section of the nin home page, you are given the ability to download the lyrics and credits. There is both a small and large file to choose from, but even the "small" file is humongous. And due to its "artistic" nature, it's a chore to scroll around to read the lyrics.

I relented and bought the DualDisc version so I could enjoy the high resolution mixes, but encountered some problems:

• Like the Judas Priest DualDisc, my computer's CD-ROM doesn't easily recognize it, thus making it a royal pain to copy. Your mileage may vary.
  
• My DVD-A player refuses to play the hi-rez audio properly. This is actually a problem my Pioneer DV-563A has with certain DVD-A discs, so I have to get its firmware upgraded at a service center.
  
• The disc does not support downmixing, so for those of us who are missing a center and/or subwoofer channel, we will not hear those parts of the surround hi-rez mix.
  

There is, however, a Dolby Digital 5.1 mix (which does support downmixing), so anyone that has a regular DVD player can listen to the surround mix (just at lower fidelity than the hi-rez layer). Also available on the DVD-Video layer is:

• The video for "The Hand That Feeds", in both stereo and DD 5.1.
  
• A discography of all of nin's "Halos" (releases), complete with 45 minutes of samples of select songs and videos. This is informative and well-implemented.
  

Comments on the music itself are forthcoming.