HW: EMI Reissues

[Captain Bl@ck]

To my ears, Warrior and Quark were both processed through what sounds like
some form of 'energiser' such as an Aphex Aural Exciter; this basically adds
top end 'fizz' in the form of low order distortion.

Astounding was not, I believe done this way, plus it sounds like the
keyboards were recorded direct to the desk rather than the usual practice of
miking up the keybard amps. Also the bass playing has a lot to do with it;
Rudolph sticking with almost root note playing and very tight timing
compared to the more extreme fret board excursions of Lemmy and Shaw.

But back to the vinyl versus CD debate for a moment; the reason a lot of
early CD reissues sounded so awful was

a: because they were taken from the tapes used to master the vinyl; that is
to say, the bass was rolled off (to fit it onto the LP groove).

b: They used poor quality A-D converters.

And Doug touched upon something else in his reply; why so many modern CD's
are recorded with a minimal dynamic range compared to the theoretical
possibilities of the medium.

Shall you tell 'em or shall I?



----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Youles" <youless at LVCM.COM>
To: <BOC-L at LISTSERV.SPC.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2003 4:43 PM
Subject: Re: HW: EMI Reissues


> Oh all right then, I'll bite...
>
> 'Warm' for Quark and 'Clean' for Hawklords are perfect one-word
> characterisations of those albums, although Hawklords could be
> considered 'clean' only by HW's standards, I suspect - cf. the muddier
tone
> of, say, Doremi.  (BTW, the single version of 25 Years is far
> from 'clean' ; it snarls!)  PXR5 is like a box of chocolates with soft-
and
> hard-centres, dark and light chocolate etc.
>
> WOTEOT has too much going on for one word to charactise it as
successfully,
> but if anything I would take 'Lush' away from ASAM and apply it to
Warrior.
>
> Astounding Sounds - the word I would use is 'Hollow'.  I don't mean this
> perjoratively, but all the instruments sound as though they're circling
> around the periphery and in the middle is...nothing.  (On Quark, you would
> find Ade Shaw's bubbling basslines and Simon House's excellent keyboard
> work at the eye of the hurricane -avoided saying 'cyclone' there, Tom!  On
> Space Ritual everything sounds as though it's built around Dave & Lemmy.)
>
> Not being an audiophile or conversant with some of the technical terms you
> used, Doug (RIBAA curve, was it?) I can't explain why I generally prefer
> the sound of vinyl to CD, but the latter medium often sounds to me like
the
> upper and lower frequencies have been boosted and the middle cut.  Well,
> Astounding sounded like that even when it was on vinyl!  Not that I
dislike
> the album - au contraire, I think the *material* is excellent.  I wonder
if
> it would be theoretically possible to remix it, as you described your
> friend Karl doing, and discover the hidden centre of this album?  Not that
> you can 'put back in' what was never there in the first place, of course.
>
>
> Steve
>
>
> --Doug
wrote:--------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 'Warrior' - "powerful";
> 'Astounding Sounds' - "lush";
> 'Quark' - "warm";
> 'Hawklords' - "clean";
> 'PXR5' - hmmmm ... that one's tough since there's no consistent overall
> sound to it because of the different sources [studio vs. live vs. demo],
> the way there is for the other four ... (I'd be very curious to hear if
> anyone particularly agreed or disagreed with my rough characterization of
> those four albums.)