I picked it up today and like it a good bit. I see the point about listening to it w/ speakers, but with my V6's it's just as satisfing. I particuarly like "Concerning Hobbits", which sounds exactly like I expected it would, and "The Breaking of the Fellowship"(track 17) .
One thing that gets me thought is that this doesn't feel like a complete soundtrack, instead it sounds like more of a sampler. The different themes are there, but they are kind of dangle, as if they don't tie together. I heard somewhere that there is about two hours of music for the movie so they left some out, which I wonder about when they could have made it a two disk set.
Besides that the word that comes to my mind to describe this album is "epic". It just seems big, as if it were encompassing many places, which I guess is kind of the point. Because of this some of the music seems kind of random, not in arrangement, but more because there are so many different types of music on the cd.
Although I only pointed out flaws, I'm happy with my purchase. The things I pointed out were the only negatives, the music is great and has emotion, the singing in some of the tracks is wonderful, and the quality of the recording if fantastic (hey, it's the London Phillharmonic, so it isn't exactly second class), but I have the feeling that the music will make a whole lot more sense after seeing the movie.
