Yes, AKUS Live is a great album, but, IMO, it is utterly
RUINED by a typical American audience who will not
SHUT UP (no offence towards the two of you; just telling the truth). There is this strange cultural thing, in America, where audiences whoop, holler, and wolf-whistle, etc.,
all over the artist's performance, and it really grates for those of us, in other countries, who pay good money to hear the artist perform.
Rant over-with, I find virtually all of Alison's albums are well-recorded, but there are 2, in particular, that stand out, to my ears.
1)
'So Long, So Wrong' - this is just gorgeously-recorded.
2) An old solo album of Alison's, called
'I've Got That Old Feeling' - nowhere near as polished as her later work, with Union Station, and (as much as I like Union Station) that is exactly it's charm - it's relative lack of production finesse. The recording acoustic is much more realistic, rather than feeling as though each instrument has been recorded seperately, and then pasted into a downmix.
'Forget About It' also deserves an honourable mention, for good SQ, but the above 2 are the ones that take it, for me, even though I can happily listen to almost every Alison album, on a regular basis, such is the quality of her, and Union Station's (and Jerry Douglas') musicianship.
Incidentally, there is a track on the album you mentioned, Peter, called 'Lucky One', and I've always enjoyed the rich tone (
'timbre' seems to be the audiophile word-of-choice, at the present time!) of Ron Block's guitar, on that recording. Speaking of which, his guitar sounds similarly stunning, on the '
Rounder Records 40th Anniversary Concert' DVD, on the track 'Gravity', although, unfortunately, it's only a standard .ac3 soundtrack, rather than DTS.
For anyone reading this thread who is unfamiliar with Alison Krauss's many nice tracks, I
listed a few, over in the Mojo thread, a while back, which can give you a taster, with the caveat that youtube compression decreases the sound quality one would experience from true Redbook CD.
