BOC: WOTT mish mosh, remastering..

[Craig Shipley]

>
> >         The first four (from BOC) to me sound better than the vinyl. Whoever
> > said "no remastering" must be mixed up. In order to get these songs on this CD
>
> Okay, well, I think I chose poorly my words about no remastering.  What I
> was lamenting was the fact that the BOC discs (WOTT or otherwise) have not
> been redone in the same way that Columbia has remastered all of the Aerosmith
> catalog.  This process has also been done for Yes, the Rolling Stones, Led
> Zeppelin, among others.  I believe Bolle mentioned this 20-bit mastering
> technique in his review of WOTT recently.  I'm not sure about the sampling
> rates for all of the Yes/Stones/Zeppelin/etc stuff, but as I understand it,
> the higher the sampling rate (20 bit being on the high end of things these
> days?) the closer digital comes to sounding like analog.  And to my ear,
> the improvements made with the remastered Aerosmith are more significant
> than the improvements made from the early BOC to the WOTT versions.
>
No insult meant, Bryan, but just upping the sampling rate or the bit
density won't do a damn bit of good if the original source sounds like
crap! Stero Review did a bit (naughty boy! No puns!) on the 20-bit gold
CD's that Columbia was/is reissuing. Their finding was that the biggest
improvement came from remastering the music for the CD medium from the
master tapes. The 24k gold and 20-bit mastering contributes (the 24k gold
is probably contributing more to profit$ than to sound) somewhat, but not
as much as that lil' ol' remastering job. A little bit of sonic tweaking
can help (aka Sonic Solutions or No Noise), but it must be used carefully
or you can throw the baby out with the bath water! Like, getting rid of
most, if not all, of the tape hiss on the first BOC...

All of Yes's releases were remastered from the original tapes, but the
20-bit mastering and 24k gold marketing stuff was not used. The CD's
sound great! Tangerine Dream has had a number of it's titles remastered
and 20-bitted and the results were worth the price (uhhh, BTW, all of
the above, with the exception of multi-CD releases, were less than $US 10.00
at Best Buys). So, I guess I'm trying to say that there dosen't seem to
be a whole lot of money needing to be spent to get the remastering job
done...

Ideally, the BOC back-catalog deserves the re-mastering effort, along with
the restoration of the original liner notes/photos. 20-bit mastering would
be nice (hell, start mastering _all_ CD's with the 20-bit thingamabobby;
can't cost any more to do it than normal 16-bit. And just how many of you
have a 20-bit CD player, anyhoo???), but 24k gold would just raise the
price.  And promote the remasters! Let 'em ride along on the coat-tails
of WotT! Get a "rarities" CD out of the SWU/SFG material, the GTDTW versoin
of "Bucks' Boogie", the "live in '72" EP un-altered/sequenced, the B-sides
of the Euro "BFY", whatever else is in the crypts! Give us fans something
to buy and to enjoy (I _might_ have bought WotT if there was a cleaned-up
version of LDoM on it, but there isnt...)

> So I was just trying to say that the BOC catalog deserves the same treatment
> Aerosmith got in terms of the more rigorous, top of the line remastering,
> not to mention the repackaging with original graphics/notes/etc.
> Mirrors & RBN were very sorry reissues along these lines.
>
> -Bryan
>
I think we are in agreement (or as I saw it elsewhere, "reverent agreement").

objCassette Deck: Corporation / Breed

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