I don't think it sounds very good at all, but it definitely sounds better than most DT albums since Shirley stopped doing them.
I think it sounds better than any DT album ever. The guitars are so much more crisp, and the sound is so polished and powerful.
Not even close. It works well enough for what it is, but it's generic metal production, and it's got that typical triggered sounding metal drum sound that has zero dynamics, and wouldn't work well applied to DT's prog style. It could have been any old metal drummer behind the kit on that album for all it mattered, because it has no nuance, and sounds very quantized and compressed. I wouldn't want MM's playing to lose its subtlety and dynamics on the next DT album, especially after being so poorly mixed on the last one.
And the guitars and bass mush together into a muddy sameness, worse than any of the recent DT albums where people complain about not being able to hear JM's bass. It sounds nice and heavy for a straight-forward headbanging album like that, but it's no good for DT's music. The guitar has a lot of sub-woof that overpowers the bass. There's a lot of bass in there, just not a lot of clarity and tooooone.
And the whole thing is over-compressed too.
As I said, it works for what it is, and I
love the album, and the production fits that music quite well, but that same production would not translate well at all to DT's music. It does sound better than DT's last two albums overall, but it's flat metal production with no dynamics or clarity, and would sound horrid on a DT album. Apples to oranges.
I don't know why they ever stopped using Kevin Shirley, because none of their albums since have sounded anywhere near as good.