BOC: Remasters??

[Stephen Swann]

On Sun, Aug 22, 2004 at 02:05:42AM +0100, Jon Jarrett wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
> >
> > Blasphemy indeed!  All things considered, the sound of the CD doesn't
> > seem so dreadful to me -- but there are a lot of things to be
> > considered.  I have a vague memory of Al saying that the original tapes
> > got quite a lot of wear in the making of the record, though I suppose
> > that may not be relevant to the remastering process.
>
>         I would dearly love to hear _Imaginos_ remastered. I find its
> thick overcrowded sound and its low volume levels, on CD or on cassette
> (have never heard the vinyl) put me off listening to it (after all,

If you listen to it on a sufficiently revealing sound
system, the sound of the CD isn't so much "thick" as complex
and layered.  The vinyl sounds rather worse - the album is
really too long for a vinyl release, and they had to squeeze
the grooves too tightly together.  Can't speak for the
cassette, although it's just a truism that commerically
produced cassette tapes are going to muddy the sound.

>         Failing that though, I confess that _Spectres_ and
> _Mirrors_ are my two least favourite BOC albums (with
> _Club Ninja_ wandering around in a kind of
> Neptune-Pluto-Charon configuration so that sometimes it's
> my least favourite) almost entirely because of the way
> they sound, which again I accept is period detail but
> which I would love to lose so that the material doesn't
> sound so dense and wooly.

I think that Spectres is probably the worst mastered BOC
album ever.  To me it sounds worse (more boomy/muddy) than
the debut album, which people have described as sounding
like it was recorded on a 4 track recorder buried in sand. :)
Which sucks, because Spectres is one of my favorite BOC
albums...

And did you just describe the sound of _Mirrors_ as dense
and wooly?  Mirrors is probably the brightest, openest
sounding BOC album ever recorded, so much that people have
harshed on it for being "too light", and sounding "like
a pop album"!  :-)

--
Steve Swann    | Speak to me in many voices, make
swann at cugc.org |     them all sound like one