Ringo 5.1 is, as you may have guessed, an album featuring the 5.1 Surround Sound audio feature in both Dolby Digital and DTS formats. It is also a best of album hand picked by Starr himself featuring his favorites from recent solo albums. For the most part it’s a mixed bag.

It hasn't been a considerable amount of time since DVD-Audio arrived (8 years) and in most cases the feature finds itself presented on mostly special edition copies of albums which people will seldom choose over the cheaper versions, unless the deal is outrageously undeniable. With that being said I only have a handful of albums in which I can compare the feature. On its own I have to admit that Ringo 5.1 in DTS Surround Sound is a work of art. The music is divided by speaker in which one corner of my living room is alive with guitar while another is bass and at the forefront you have vocals and percussion. When a track has a choir backing it, forget about it, its beautiful.

Unlike most human beings on this planet I was in love with the Beatles experimentation and sound but found their song writing skills relatively weak and uninspiring, for the most part. Starr suffers from this disease and for most of the album I’m left wondering if its possible that he is milking the whole Beatles fame. Either he is a man with true conviction or every track that talks about his glory days with the Fab 4 and or about Love is simply a clinging effort to remain current in the shadow of the Beatles popularity. Starr’s backing band is good and some tracks on the album are exceptional, most notably Memphis In Your Mind, which again may or may not find correlation between John Lennon’s confessed inspiration towards music by Memphis icon Elvis Presley. The main problem that I have with the majority of the tracks on the album is that their choruses seem to repeat themselves far to often which makes those tracks feel unnecessarily extended which sours any appeal they might have.

Ringo 5.1 comes with both the 5.1 DVD-Audio Surround Sound version (music only, no video’s) and a regular CD copy with Dolby Surround. On the DVD version there is a discrepancy with the track listing so you have to watch out for it after Track 8. The DVD version also comes with a bonus track not featured on the CD version. Enjoy.