In this thread “edit sacrilege” was mentioned but I’d like to take a moment out of our busy schedules to talk a little about “Re-Mastering Sacrilege”. Particularly I’d like to discuss albums whose original qualities have been destroyed by those trying to give the buying public a ’better product’. Off the top of my head I can think of several: Iggy Pop – Raw Power: they took the power away and made it sound thin. KISS – Love Gun: sounds thin and wooden. Ozzy Ozbourne – (several of them): not as warm and full as the originals. Rush – (several of them): sounds thin and compressed – not as dynamic.
Dopers, here is your chance to name your albums that got killed in the re-mastering process.
Grateful Dead - Anthem of the Sun. They actually added sounds and messed with the mix. I thought it was just fine before.
Beatles - White Album. I can’t exactly remember the panning on the LP, but the panning on the CD seems either hard left or right with not much in the middle. It doesn’t coalesce as well.
You can’t be talking about the Iggy Pop remix, surely. That’s a different sound to the vinyl, but it’s much fuller - if anything, it’s not thin enough.
One of the worst reissues is the first version of the Velvet Underground And Nico album aka the Banana album (the one with the band name on the front). This was a disaster, taking all the power out of the original album and remixing it so that the drums sound tinny and the vocals are just loud enough to start obscuring the guitars. On top of that, they used an inferior ‘single voice’ version of ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’, which should have been left in the can.
Of course, despite that, this was the version that I first heard that made them my favourite band, so sometimes even a shoddy mastering job doesn’t do that much damage overall.
The ZZ Top catalog has been ruined. When you hear La Grange on the radio, the drums have way too much echo added to make it sound more “rock”, as if Frank Beard was replaced with a drum machine. I was horrified when I bought the Tres Hombres CD and discovered that the whole album sounds like this. Same with Fandango and Rio Grande Mud. They even changed words and added sound effects to some of the songs. The first line of Jesus Just Left Chicago sounds like it was cut and pasted from another part of the song; the words are the same but with different inflection. The last line of Mexican Blackbird is changed to “The wings of the blackbird will spread like an eagle for you”, along with additional dialog during the harmonica solo. They basically took some great blues records and tried (and failed) to turn them into rock records.
In the case of Pentangle’s album Sweet Child, some b@stard editor thought that the songs would sound better in a whole different order. If you are used to the sequence of the original album it is really jarring. The same goes for Bert Jansch’s Rosemary Lane. Many of John Renbourn’s original Transatlantic albums were butchered in a similar fashion when they were converted to CD. These recording studio dilettantes can blow me!
In later re-releases of Bonzo Dog Doh Dah Bands’ work, the editors have cranked up Eric Clapton’s guitar passages thinking that’s the only important portion of such fabulously original material. What a travesty!