>>Do you really think I'm the type of person who really find the length of time to sit through in one sitting an issue?
I'm not trying to tell you what your own listening habits are. But they certainly don't represent the majority of music listeners, which is what I'm talking about. Worthless to you does not mean worthless to everyone.
>>"However the CD *isn't* redundant since it consists of mostly completely different performances."
>>Recently I bought Blondie's new album that came with a CD where the band re-record their greatest hits.
>>>You could say that because they are completely different performance it isn't redundant OR you could say that all those performances were inferior to the original version due to mediocre vocal performances due to an aging vocalist.
Blondie's thing was a bunch of halfassed studio recordings intended to trick people into buying their crappy new album. However, because the material is newly recorded it's still not completely redundant. If they had just stuck the old hits on there then it would have been. Like what The Beach Boys did when they released the Carl & The Passions album with Pet Sounds as a 2nd disk. That was really a ripoff.
But anyway, you're comparing apples and oranges here since live and studio are different.
The U2 live album is made of material featuring different performances, even if dont like those performances, the fact that they're different performances means that it's not a superfluous or redundant release. To me it seems like if they had of given the CD title from the video you would have been just fine with it because it wouldn't have invited the comparison it would have just been "some other songs from the tour" and little else. You could treat it as bonus tracks or something.
A better comparison would be Rush's Exit Stage Left. the CD is a relatively sterile affair playing and mixing the songs very close to the studio versions, the video versions on the other hand are much more raw and powerful. Both versions feature different recordings and different tracklists and despite the fact that most folks agree that the video version is the superior performance, both are worth getting for fans because they aren't the same thing. The Genesis release Live Over Europe/When in Rome did the same thing (however the mixing is pretty similar on both and they were smart about it giving the two releases different titles).
Saying one version of something is better than the other doesn't mean that the other thing is worthless, it just means that the other thing is worse. Worse =/= worthless.
>>"But unless he actually did a separate DVD review"
>>That's what I have been arguing for him to do for the entire opening post. That he should review the DVD separately as it's a core part of U2's legacy.
Well, it's obviously not my decision since it's not my website. but considering that he didn't review any Yes DVDs (despite his extremely detailed and meticulous Yes page), or Pink Floyd's Live In Pompeii (which is pretty much the most iconic landmark live performance from them), or any other DVDs whatsoever (unless I'm forgetting something) I think it's a pretty safe bet that any U2 or Sparks DVDs are off the table. This is an album review site and the fact of the matter is that live performance videos aren't albums.