Looking for some sweet surround sound music to show off your system? Stop looking for discs and start looking at internet downloads.

If you’re still looking for great high-resolution, multichannel music Show-Offs on disc, I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you’re looking in the wrong place. These days, digital distribution via the internet has risen from the ashes of DVD-Audio and SACD as the format of choice for discerning audiophiles in need of a 5.1 fix.

For the back story on this digital download revolution, be sure to check out my feature story, “Downloads on the Up and Up”. Then head back this way and let’s listen to a few of the best Show-Offs that iTrax.com and MusicGiants.com have to offer.

John Gorka: The Gypsy Life (iTrax)
Best Track: “Lightning’s Blues” (WMA Lossless Stage Mix)

Perhaps my favorite thing about this collection of John Gorka numbers is that it perfectly encapsulates everything that iTrax is about. Simply put, it’s beautifully recorded music, delivered straight to your listening room, without the extravagant production and ham-fisted processing imposed on modern music by the radio industry. If I had to pick one song at gunpoint that best demonstrates this refreshing approach to music delivery, I would have to go with “Lightning’s Blues,” a rip-roaring romp that I double-dog dare you to sit through without at least tapping your toes to the beat.

I’ll admit, though, it can be a bit disconcerting at first if you’ve never experienced the way Mark Waldrep records music. When Gorka’s guitar first kicks in, your brain won’t quite know what to do with it. Something doesn’t sound right. It’s not the quacking, overly bright jangle-jungle that MTV Unplugged has us convinced guitar sounds like. This is—dare I say it—the sound of an actual wooden instrument.

Then the vocals kick in and, again, the sound is almost defined more by what’s missing than what’s there at first. Where’s the springy reverb? Where’s the oppressive EQ? This sounds like… a man. Singing. In the room with you. Much like the Addams Family, it’s both creepy and incredibly cool at once. Finally the bass joins in, and instead of some overpowering thing that flaps your gums and slams you into your seat, the low end is more of a viscous fluid that fills the room from the bottom up, clinging to the carpet and serving as the glue that binds the vocals, guitar, mandolin, and piano into one delicious—and disturbingly realistic—whole.

The Band: Music from Big Pink (MusicGiants)
Best Track: “Chest Fever” [Super HD 5.1]

If you’re looking for something a little more familiar, go grab this righteous 5.1 remix of the Band’s debut album—originally released on DVD-Audio and now available as a part of MusicGiants’ Super HD collection. Don’t expect the same pristine transparency with this one that the Gorka track offers, though—this isn’t a spanking new digital recording overseen by an obsessive audiophile. It’s the same old sumptuously homegrown analog Big Pink we’ve known and loved for decades, digitally preserved in its gritty glory, and woven into a trippy, abstract, kaleidoscopic tapestry of funky aural bliss.

Unsurprisingly, “Chest Fever” positively thrives in this environment. Garth Hudson’s Toccata-esque organ intro slices through the room—not so much compressing the molecules of air as slithering between them—before settling into a rocking, bone-penetrating backbeat that permeates and defines the song. The drums follow, sounding like walls trying to reach for the center of the room, in perfect contrast to the vocals, which stretch for the four corners, not of their own volition, but like pure energy being drawn and quartered. The hard-driving guitar hangs around the periphery, tied to some heavy time-space anomaly near the front-right of the room. And somehow out of all of this emerges a delicate center of gravity, ebbing and pulsating, threatening to collapse at any moment, and all the more impressive because it never does.

Chamber Music Palisades: Shostakovich/Debussy/Brockman (iTrax)
Best Track: “Shostakovich: Piano Quintet Op. 57—I. Prelude” (WMA Lossless Stage Mix)

Classical music has always fared well in the high-resolution multichannel formats, perhaps because of its tendency toward colossal dynamic swings, as well as the fact that it didn’t lend itself to the sort of gauche, off-putting, cacophonous mixes that plagued so much popular music in the DVD-Audio/SACD era. But even the best high-res classical recordings from other studios pale in comparison to the pitch-perfect presentations found in this collection.

You don’t have to dig any deeper than the first track, the Prelude to Shostakovich’s “Opus 57: Piano Quintet in G minor,” for a taste of what sets this one apart. From the hammering of the second note—the first still lingering in the air—you realize that the piano isn’t a point source in this recording; it’s a three dimensional entity, with weight and width and warmth. The mix doesn’t achieve this by rubbing your nose in the strings; it simply and elegantly paints the instrument to scale a few feet in front of you.

When the strings finally join in, it quickly becomes apparent that they aren’t slaves to speaker placement, as if the cellist says, “I’m fully aware that’s where you want me, but if it’s all the same to you, I think I would sound better over here.” Best of all, the meticulous direct-digital recording of Mark Waldrep picks up the ultrasonic nuances and timbre of the instruments that so many recordings miss—the airy, ethereal quality of bows on strings that often skips your ears and catches right in your throat.

Al Di Meola: Flesh on Flesh (MusicGiants)
Best Track: “Flesh on Flesh” [Super HD 5.1]

For something a bit jazzier, check out this eclectic fusion tour de force, rescued from the wreckage of SACD and presented in yummy WMA Lossless 5.1 by MusicGiants. From beginning to end, the album is the stuff that speaker demos are made of—tight, playful bass; silky smooth midrange the color of sunset and the consistency of butter; sweet, sweet highs that penetrate without puncturing—but if you’re looking for that one go-to track that sums up the experience succinctly, look no further than the title cut.

The song starts off holding its cards close to its chest; the introductory licks mingle around the front soundstage in a convincing imitation of mono on steroids. Then the Cuban rhythm kicks in, joined by the loping bass line, and here the mix flirts unabashedly with the rest of the room, bopping beats and bass notes out into the surrounds like they were the business end of a paddle ball. Then the groove finally kicks in for good and the mix goes through a paradigm shift, yanking the beat back into the front speakers and sending flute and synth guitar out into the room to form the roux of a spicy sonic soup that’s M’m! M’m! Good! to the last Phrygian scale lick.