HW: Castle CD's

[Tim Gadd]

At 01:26 PM 3/9/00 +0000, Jon Jarrett wrote:

>        Well, for six or so HW albums the Castle CDs are the only
>CDs; they all came out remstered and repackaged last year (L79,
>_Levitation_, _Xenon Codex_, _Space Bandits_, _Electric Tepee_ and
>IItBotFtBD). They were discussed briefly on here before the thread got
>confused with, and hijacked by the EMI remasters of the iorst six albums,
>and I still think that may have been why Castle did it, but as far as we
>could tell there was in fact no difference at all between original CDs and
>remasters, which is a pity since at least XC would be dramatically
>improved by a clean-up IMO. As far as your question goes, though, I have
>the Castle _Levitation_ and there's nothing wrong with it at all, lovely
>and clear. It was however a marvellously-produced album - I imagine _Live
>'79_ would be more difficult to CD-master. Hope this helps, yours,


Yep, thanks. Presumably they got their act together. I don't actually know
how they managed to make those other albums sound so _bad_ though. The one I
recall as being particularly dreadful was The Kinks Are the Village Green
Preservation Society. Reprise went and released it on CD more recently, and
_they_ managed to somehow over-record it, so there was all this distortion
in the bass. The LP version is still the only one I've heard that sounds
right.  The only Castle album I have nowadays is Motorhead's No Remorse,
which is also definately inferior to the vinyl versions. I'm not, BTW, a
vinyl freak. I have no real nostalgia for vinyl at all, and usually ditch
the vinyl version of anything if I get a good CD version. Except some of my
HW of course. Griffin made a commendable effort of recreating the original
fold-out cover of Warrior, but it's not _quite_ the same, and I'll always
have to have a fold-out-every-whichway vinyl version of Space Ritual, just
so when I'm really old I can say to people when albums come on little data
cubes the size of a matchbox, "Look, this was is what the 70's were like!"
--
Tim Gadd
Hobart, Tasmania