Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose: Morocco, Quest for the Kasbah Blu-ray

Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose: Morocco, Quest for the Kasbah

 (TV) (2009)

Documentary | Nature



Experience the sultry landscape and spicy culture of Morocco in high definition. Africans, Arabs, Jews, Europeans, sultans, scholars, pirates and holy men came from the south, from the east and the north to this land in the northwest corner of Africa. Along the way, they sought refuge in Kasbahs. Go behind the towering walls of these ancient fortress cities, from Marrakesh to coastal Essaouria to Casablanca. Travel by camel and spend the night in a nomad tent in the Sahara Desert. Discover Fès, Tangier, Rabat and traverse the Atlas Mountains with explorer Richard Bangs as he seeks to find the modern meaning of the Kasbah in Morocco.

For more details about Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose: Morocco, Quest for the Kasbah on Blu-ray, see the Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose: Morocco, Quest for the Kasbah Blu-ray Review

Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose: Morocco, Quest for the Kasbah Blu-ray, Video Quality

 


There are both pluses and minuses to the video presentation of this Adventure with Purpose, which arrives with an MPEG-2 codec. For about 95% of the time, this is a wonderfully sharp and incredibly colorful Blu-ray, with brilliant saturation and some excellent detail. You can count the hairs on a camel's face, or see the unbelievably complex patterns in various arabesques, for example. Unfortunately, for the other 5% of the time, you're greeted by some abysmally bad ringing and shimmer on familiar items like trees, but also, perhaps a bit more unusually, on sand dunes and the like. In fact at one point Bangs talks about the "shimmer of the desert" and I almost thought he was describing the artifacting of this Blu-ray. If you can overlook these admittedly relatively quickly passing moments, there's a lot to enjoy here.

Richard Bangs' Adventures with Purpose: Morocco, Quest for the Kasbah Blu-ray, Audio Quality

 


I'm not sure if something like this television features screams out for a 5.1 mix, although with the abundance of ethnic musics offered in this particular episode, some audiophiles may be pining for more than this PCM 2.0 track. That said, there's perfect fidelity and decent enough separation on this track, with everything from Bangs' voiceovers and on screen narration to the really wonderful music delivered with excellent fidelity. There is some fun low end "whomp" here in the many African drum segments.