Your favorite sounding DT album (best mix)

[don_waka]

FII & 6DOIT

[mikeyd23]

My go to in terms of mix is usually SDOIT.

SFAM and FII are also excellent.

All of them mixed by Kevin Shirley, btw.

Would love to see him working with DT again, even if it's only to mix an album.

Yup, there's definitely a theme to my picks. I'd love to have Kevin involved with a DT record again. Like you said, even just mixing would be great if JP really wants to still be the producer.

[Logain Ablar]

FII for sure, closely followed by SDOIT and then SFAM.

[seasonsinthesky]

My go to in terms of mix is usually SDOIT.

SFAM and FII are also excellent.

All of them mixed by Kevin Shirley, btw.

Would love to see him working with DT again, even if it's only to mix an album.

There are still some songs with the original David Bottrill mixed used on SFAM, so Shirley didn't do every song.

He's my answer too, though. FII, SFAM and SDOIT sound fantastic. I have reservations about the mix on basically every other album.

[Drinktheater]

Awake has always been my favorite. Everything sounds very spacious and the mix seems to have a lot of open space and depth as compared to something like Systematic Chaos where the mix seems devoid of empty space and everything is as tight and squeezed as possible.

You took the words out of my mouth!

The AWAKE Album mix like you said has some space an atmosphere if you imagine a fantasy surrealistic dream world and how it will sound its the Awake album its hard to explain the Keyboard mix and tone of Kevin M. is just cool to the ears the clean sounds of JPs guitar is just refreshing as well!

I think the Musicality and the mix in that album really came together.


If you look at the Album Artwork alone and tried to imagine how the band sounds you would say the Album art depicted an accurate visual representation of the sound

[Shooters1221]

Despite Falling Into Infinity being my least favorite Dream Theater album, it without question has the best production in their entire discography.

THIS!

[DT1138]

It's a tie between Awake and Falling Into Infinity for me.

Side note:  Octavarium is the worst mix for me:  Two songs I LOVE on this album (Root of All Evil and Panic Attack) have the most buried guitar solos of John's career.

[Pragmaticcircus]

Awake has always been my favorite. Everything sounds very spacious and the mix seems to have a lot of open space and depth as compared to something like Systematic Chaos where the mix seems devoid of empty space and everything is as tight and squeezed as possible.

I agree with all of this

[PixelDream]

Awake is just absolutely great sounding, indeed heavy, spacious, full range. Colorful. Very 90's sounding with the reverb, but I like that sound.

Falling Into Infinity is obviously very natural sounding, a top notch studio recording.

SFAM sounds a bit boxy to my ears, and the drums seem very seperate from the rest of the instruments. Six Degrees sounds compressed but very warm and fat. I love that sound. Everything sounds widescreen on that record.