The Doobie Brothers: The Captain and Me Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		5.0
Video		0.0
Audio		5.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		5.0

The Doobie Brothers: The Captain and Me Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman December 11, 2025

One of the earlier four channel audio Blu-rays that crossed my review queue was Chicago: Quadio in 2016, which was followed a few years later by The Doobie Brothers: Quadio Boxed Set, which Rhino and Warner Music Group put out back in 2020. Since then, Rhino has revisited offerings from both sets as standalone releases, and vis a vis the Doobies in particular, with The Doobie Brothers: Toulouse Street as a standalone Quadio release. Now they're offering another album from the original set, 1973's The Captain and Me, this time with Atmos, 5.1, Quadio and high res stereo mixes.

The album's track list can be seen in the screenshots of the disc menu I've uploaded to accompany this review.

The Doobie Brothers: The Captain and Me Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

This is another Rhino release with a static menu offering a reproduction of the cover art and a list of tracks. Parsing through the screenshots shows how the color of the font changes as each track is played, and screenshot 10 shows what it looks like if a track is playing and you scroll to another track without hitting play. Commendably, the disc has been authored so that the colored buttons on your remote allow access to the different codecs, and best of all, after a brief HDMI handshake, the song does not start over if a new codec is selected mid-tune. Since this really doesn't have video content per se, the score above is intentionally blank and this is one of those releases where once you know what the colored buttons on the remote refer to, you don't really even need to have a display engaged.

The Doobie Brothers: The Captain and Me Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Captain and Me features Dolby Atmos, DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, DTS-HD Master Audio 4.0 and DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 options, and there are some manifest differences between them. For some of my thoughts on the Quadio version, my The Doobie Brothers: Quadio Boxed Set Blu-ray review has some specific mentions of various songs on this album and their multichannel presentation in that format. To cite just one of a really large number of potential examples, though, that "burst of backup vocals" I mention in the four channel version of China Grove is considerably less discretely channeled in the Atmos mix, where the backups tend to waft as a kind of amorphous mass emanating from several channels simultaneously. Similarly all sorts of differences accrue in terms of where guitars and percussion in particular are positioned, though the biggest differences to me were between the 4.0 and Atmos versions, with the 5.1 version striking me as actually more similar to the Quadio version than the Atmos. Vocals are all beautifully mixed and the layering in all of the multichannel outings is superb, but so distinctly different at times that I heartily recommend fans of the album listen to each of the codecs, either in succession or by toggling between them.

The Doobie Brothers: The Captain and Me Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There is no supplementary content on the disc. This is another release that Rhino has packaged in the clear High Fidelity Pure Audio standard Blu-ray case. The insert has an inner print simply reproducing the band and album title names. A 4 page (including covers) leaflet reproduces the original gatefold picture inside, with slightly cropped versions of the original album's front and back images/verbiage on the covers.

The Doobie Brothers: The Captain and Me Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

There are frankly times when the differences between various surround codecs on an audio Blu-ray don't reveal that many differences, but this is definitely not one of those times. I was repeatedly struck in listening to the various codecs on this disc as to how manifestly different the mixes could sound in any number of ways, including surround activity, where individual instruments are placed or even when/if they do things like pan. One way or the other, fans of this album are in for a treat and/or treats, as the case may be. Highly recommended.