Some of you might have read some articles of mine, where I make it clear that, in many situations, the new trend of producing and listening to everything, with at least six audio channels, makes zero sense.

Of course that vendors try hard to convince you of how great and preferable Dolby Digital, DTS, or whatever are - after all, they have packs of cheap speakers, decoders and amps to sell -, but if you stop for a minute and go listen your "old" plain stereo software, on decent plain stereo hardware, you'll find that they might be cheating you!

One of these days I cleaned the dust out of the Laserdisc "Queen Live at Wembley, 1986" and stereo' enjoyed it on my warrior combo Audiolab 8000P + Audiolab 8000S + Paradigm Reference Studio 100 speakers. Let me just say that the audio quality of those moments kicked DVD's any-dolby any-DTS any-whatever ass so hard, that I am reliving all my Laserdisc collection these days.

This article was to be about that experience, but it isn't... because Queen - the band - entered my room (again), a short few days after, playing at the Queen's Concert - the REAL Queen's Concert, held 2002-06-03 (the "Party at the Palace").

It was odd to listen to Queen - the band - without its key figure: Freddy Mercury. Everytime someone replaced him on the mic, the results were near sad. I remember George Michael doing the job on the concert of FM's death, and it was great, but this time, except for Brian May and Roger Taylor, the pretenders were really lame.

Here is a short 30 seconds video of Brian May (the band's founder) performing Radio Ga Ga.

The world misses a band, the size of Queen. Nowadays you have zillions of small bands, most doing very forgettable music and none with the energy to last for several generations, thus none with the strength to overcome the money-wheel problem.

But, hey just enjoy these 30 secs:

arturmarques_dot_com_queen_2002_06_03_600k.rm [2160 KB RM file]

To watch the video, just right click its link above, chose "save as" to somewhere on your PC, and then play it with Real Player (free). This is a high quality (600 kbps) file. Do not try to play it from the website, because you won't have enough bandwidth.

This video is also available from the videos page.

I tried to find where you could buy the LaserDisc "Queen, Live at Wembley - 1986" (QLW86), but it is definitely out of production and becoming an expensive rarity. The best you can do is go for the VHS:

Best* possible prices for QLW86 (VHS), are:

for european costumers: http://www.amazon.co.uk (8.99£ = 14.07€) [direct link]

for american costumers: http://www.amazon.com (19.95 USD) [direct link]

*the "best" classification comes from:

#1) deep searching all trusty e-commerce sites using Copernic Shopper Plus;

#2) considering the taxes on imported goods;

#3) considering the "your money back" costumer protection policies.

Conversion rates were computed as of 2002-06-18.