Jean-Michel Jarre – Live In Bratislava – A magnificent box set with TV-quality sound!! Review CD, Blu-ray Vinyl record

[Jean.Francois]

Hello,
Jean-Michel Jarre has announced the release of Bridge From The Future, the official audio-visual album of his historic open-air concert on May 12, 2024, in Bratislava, Slovakia. Available worldwide on September 5, 2025, it includes a limited Ultimate Collector’s Box Set.

The box set is particularly impressive, as shown in the photo: it contains the concert on Blu-ray video with high-quality visuals, offering PCM stereo tracks, DTS HDMA 5.1, and Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1, as well as 2 CDs and a transparent blue vinyl disc featuring two previously unreleased tracks.

On closer inspection, however, we discover Jean-Michel Jarre’s note:

Furthermore, the 5.1 versions are actually just an upmix of the stereo version.
What does this warning mean?
It’s quite simple: in professional video and television production, recordings normally use masters with PCM audio tracks (16 or 24 bits, 48 kHz).

Here, these masters were not used. Instead, the audio likely comes from the televised broadcast, compressed with lossy data to reduce the bitrate to 128 kbit/s (AAC128 or equivalent, such as Dolby Digital or MPEG). This results in a bandwidth limited to 16 kHz most of the time, with occasional peaks up to 21 kHz. This is clearly visible on the spectrogram below (the yellow arrow shows the 16 kHz limit, the white arrow shows the 21 kHz limit):

The audio spectrum also confirms this 16 kHz limit, as shown in the graph below:

For the vinyl, the situation is the same, with the same limitation visible on its spectrum:

As the saying goes, “a fault admitted is half a fault pardoned”: Jean-Michel Jarre warns us from the start about the technical limitations related to live conditions. Visually, the result is convincing, but the choices made for the audio are difficult to understand. So where are the original PCM stereo master and backup recordings?

This leads to significant disappointment in the audio quality. While Jean-Michel Jarre talks about spatial sound, one might have expected a concert presented in Dolby Atmos.
With today’s modern technologies, it is surprising that this concert falls so short in musical quality compared to Concert in China, released in 1982, 43 years ago. Fortunately, the show remains visually impressive and provides a real feast for the eyes.

You can access all the audio excerpts, as well as the complete analysis and full explanations about this album here (link).

I was going to write “enjoy listening,” but I’d rather wish you an enjoyable viewing experience.

Jean-François

 

[MaxwellsEq]

That's mad. The pre-distribution capture must be somewhere! Feels a bit like a "Rights" issue!

 

[respice finem]

Thanks for the warning.

 

[Puddingbuks]

These shows are so over the top kitsch.

 

[DWPress]

Takes me back 35 years to Zoolook, had to dig out my vinyl for a reference then spun it on Tidal lol. Even if the SQ is off, I can't hear much above 16Khz anyway but it looks like it suffers from other compression as well. I'll still give it a listen and hope for the best.

 

[krumpol]

So where are the original PCM stereo master and backup recordings?

Deep in RTVS (Slovak television) archive most likely, along with rest of the music festival.
J. M. Jarre was only one of guests, it was not event organised or financed by him or his team.

 

[respice finem]

The original masters may come next year as "super deluxe edition" - milking the cash cow is nothing new

 

[Jean.Francois]

Takes me back 35 years to Zoolook, had to dig out my vinyl for a reference then spun it on Tidal lol. Even if the SQ is off, I can't hear much above 16Khz anyway but it looks like it suffers from other compression as well. I'll still give it a listen and hope for the best.

The cutoff at 16 kHz indicates the use of low-bitrate AAC compression. In practice, this results in a loss of precision and subtlety in the musical rendering — and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. I should put more emphasis on this aspect.

 

[DWPress]

The cutoff at 16 kHz indicates the use of low-bitrate AAC compression.

I'm well aware of this. I think you showed it adequately on first post.

 

[Oddball]

Well at least the original event was a feast.

 

[DWPress]

I just listened to it. Enjoyed it for awhile but couldn't finish, more a monotonous rave drone after a while. Sound quality on my system was adequate enough to turn it up to 85db and not lose to many dynamics, pretty good for a live recording actually. Now listening to Oxymore, a studio production from 2022, which has much more head room and experimental musical diversity I enjoyed in his work 30 years ago.

 

[tommyboy71]

It's a great disappointment when great artists, who became famous for producing the highest quality work, take such an easy way out and try to sell us a sort of half-finished product.

 

[MaxwellsEq]

It might be that the TV company controls Rights and access to the relatively uncompressed audio for the whole show whilst JMJ has Rights to his particular performance, but not necessarily access to the in-house sources.

 

[pavuol]

who gives a damn, just another dust catcher priced ~100 Eur..

 

[LTig]

You can see and hear it on YouTube: