I've listened to this disc several times now, in both stereo and multichannel. I've had the LP box set since it came out last year, and did a comparison to that as well. I also have the GAS version of the CD, and did a quick comparison to that.
The LP to SACD comparison is a bit unfair. I have an absolutely excellent digital source, but I also have an excellent turntable with a top-notch cartridge and a top-notch tube phonostage. The LP ends up sounding more "alive" as a result.
Anyway, it's obvious that a lot of care was taken into transferring this release to stereo SACD. In many ways it is similar to the sound of the LP, which is what most of us look for in SACD. The stereo SACD area does a very good job of placing the listener in the audience at a Kraftwerk concert. Like other recent Kraftwerk releases, the sound quality is impeccable, and imaging is breathtaking.
The SACD betters the CD in the areas of soundstage depth, and the "live" vibrant quality I mentioned about the LP. The LP is still better than the SACD at this, but the SACD is substantially better than the CD, which sounds a bit constricted and flat in direct comparison.
I also listened in multichannel several times. I was disappointed with this area. I expect that a typical pop/electronica studio release will have a gimmicky surround mix where instruments are placed willy-nilly in the surround field. This is one of the reasons why I haven't been much of a multichannel fan. For a recording of a live concert, I have an expectation that the multichannel soundfield will be more of an "in the audience" perspective than the typical studio recording gimmickry.
Unfortunately, the engineer(s) who created the multichannel mix treated it as if it were a studio recording. Instruments and voices are placed everywhere, and the audience noises come from all speakers seemingly indiscriminately. It works ok for some of the music, but most of the time I really wasn't sure whether I was supposed to be in the middle of the audience or in the middle of the stage.
So - sound quality, excellent. Stereo, excellent. Multichannel, a poor showing.
Absolutely a must for the MC lovers. Dynamics really take your breath away, with peaks only felt in studios before, hi-freqs no LP could ever hope to sing. Now, even people at home can feel what it feels like to be surprised by a blast of amplitude that only the 24 bit audio can reproduce. Sorry LP lovers, the unfairyness is the other way around. No matter what you play it on or with.
A fine sounding SACD in all respects, though I have to disagree with the previous review on the MC mix, which is outstanding because it places the listener within the soundstage, instead of just from the audience perspective -- as a result, you can hear many more nuances in the music than what you hear in the stereo mix. Also, because the public address system that Kraftwerk currently uses live is MC, this MC mix does recreate the live experience faithfully. The MC mix has loads of punch even though the sounds are typically synth blips, synthetic drum polyrhythms and rather emotion-free vocals.
The only real minus of this release is the somewhat sterile renditions of some of the older material, especially "Autobahn", which sounds oddly perfunctory when compared to the original 1975-era studio cut.