Search - Broadway Musical Accompaniment :: Les Miserables (Accompaniment 4-CD Set)

It's Got Everything But Quality

J. McCormick | 07/30/2004

(2 out of 5 stars)

"The editorial and customer reviews when I bought this CD, along with the unusual completeness and the price tag, made it seem like this CD was going to be something really special. It's not. Most of the tracks on this CD sound only a little better than MIDI files. In fact, songs like "Come to Me" sound so much like MIDI that it makes me wonder.



To say that this karaoke CD has an "orchestra" for the music is a gross overstatement. The "orchestra" sounds like either a decent synthesizer or a really bad recording of mediocre musicians, and the mixing job is generally poor. All too often, parts that should be quiet are blaring loud, and even if you know Les Miserables inside out, you'll probably have a hard time recognizing some of the music because the wrong parts are given dominance in the mix job.



In general, the music ranges from passable to poor. I don't at all feel that what I got was worth the $80 price tag. The music sounds very much like a karaoke disc, and a low quality one at that. The only thing this CD has going for it is that it has so many songs that your typical 5-10 song karaoke CDs lack, but frankly the typical 5-10 song karaoke CDs have better-quality music and cost a quarter of this one's price.



Don't bother unless you've just absolutely got to have all the songs that other Les Mis karaoke CDs lack, no matter how bad the music is."

If it were possible to give 0 stars, I would.

Timothy M. Duffield | Sebastopol, CA United States | 01/28/2005

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Let's start with the music quality. There is none. Once again, the Stage Stars Modus Operandi is to use music that is at least a decade old midi technology; this is absolutely inexcusable in an era when a company can buy music samples from philharmonic orchestras. Secondarily, the tempo on many of the songs is too fast. Third, and again, a major bone of contention, is if a KARAOKE company is going to take the time to produce a song with a counterpoint lyric duet, then to not include counterpoint lyric encoding is totally unacceptable."