I ran into her YouTube(R) videos, probably when I was searching for something related to K-On. I believe much of her activities involving AniSong, be it covering K-On or Yukarin songs, or attending anime related events, are marketing driven. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. I think it's a decent advertising strategy. It worked on me, didn't it?
I'm not much into Fusion style music, but I don't hate them, either. Actually, I don't really understand it. I don't even know what "Fusion" is! ww Still, I'd rather listen to this CD than listen to horribly mastered AniSong, especially on my good system. Part of the reason I picked this up is because I'm desperate to get *some* music CD that doesn't sound horrendously compressed, dynamically. I'd figured, it's a CD focusing on DRUMS for Madoka's sake, so I hoped it wouldn't be mangled up that badly, and it wasn't! Thank Homura!
So, does that mean this CD sounds awesome? Well, here's what I noticed. Keep in mind I'm not a professional audio engineer. For most of the songs, I believe the intent of the mastering engineer(?) was to recreate the drum sound as it's heard by the drummer herself. That means Hi-Hat on the left, Snare around the middle, Toms further to the right, Ride Cymbal on the right, and maybe Inverted China Boy even further to the right. Other "guest" instrumentals tend to be stuck in the middle.
The problem is, all the sound is too tightly coupled to their specific locations. Real life sound wouldn't be that directional. In my big system, everything is too far apart with a big hole in the middle. If I were to set up the speakers really close together and sit right in front of them, I might be able to get a more realistic sound stage, but one shouldn't need to adjust one's system that way to enjoy a store-bought CD. It sounds quite decent on a pair of headphones, but if that's how they came up with this master, that's sad because the whole thing has a potential to sound awesome on a big system.
Note on tracks 5 and 6, which form a single session, there are two separate drum tracks, likely played separately and then combined later. They mostly just tie the different drum tracks to the different stereo tracks. The whole thing also has a bigger sound stage (laid back). This isn't necessarily better, though. It's just different.
Dynamic range wise, it's very good. In fact, I can't remember the last time I bought a CD that sounded better on my good system than on my desktop system. I was actually happy to pump up the volume a bit and annoy my neighbor. That's saying a lot!
As far as the music itself, I like about half of them. But my personal taste shouldn't really mean anything to anyone else.
