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Topic: Time for a remaster?, I personally think so< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
trcanberra Offline




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Posted: June 08 2008, 02:55

I have just bought and listened to the remastered versions of the 3 albums in Boxed.  Aside from the remix on each, I just found the sound much more distinct and "bright" than in the older CDs.

Time for a remaster?
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Scatterplot Offline




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Posted: June 08 2008, 03:06

Nah.....leave them alone. They've been altered enough....

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We raise our voices in the night
Crying to heaven
And will our voices be heard
Or will they break Like the wind
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Korgscrew Offline




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Posted: June 08 2008, 10:05

I was told some years ago that all of Mike's quadraphonic albums - including Incantations - had been transferred to high resolution digital multitrack, remastered and were just waiting for someone at Virgin to get off his or her bottom and sort out a release on a suitable format (which at the time would have been SACD).

The Boxed mix of Tubular Bells has of course been available on SACD for quite some time, and I suspect it'll be a very long time before there's an opportunity to hear it sounding any better than that. High resolution formats just haven't taken off in the way some might have hoped - the recent trend has been towards reduced rather than increased resolution in music, in the name of convenience.
Only the surround layer is the Boxed mix - both the SACD stereo and the CD-compatible layer are the original stereo mix, as remastered for the 25th Anniversary edition.

I think all of those albums, both Boxed and Exposed, really do benefit from being played back over four channels like they were meant to be (though before anyone takes me to task on a technicality here, I did say over four channels...an SQ decoder outputs four channels' worth of sound, but it's a far cry from a discrete four channel system! That was accounted for in the mix, though, by monitoring through an encoder-decoder chain). I think Hergest Ridge makes a lot more sense in that context and I find the Incantations half of Exposed really quite exciting. I wonder what the studio version of Incantations would have been like had it been left as quad rather than folded down to stereo - I suspect that it too would have made more sense when placed in the soundspace it was conceived to fill. I find that the front to back movement is what really brings the Exposed version to life.

I like the sound of the Tubular Bells SACD, so I'd certainly like to see the rest of Boxed available in that format. It could be a good opportunity to create new stereo versions of those remixes too - though SQ encoding does basically take 4 channels and stuff them all into 2, it does it using phase shifts, amongst other things, which does lead to a rather less distinct stereo sound. Taking the original four channel master and doing a straight mix down to two would give a cleaner result. All they did for the CDs was to take the SQ encoded two channel master and transfer it straight to CD, which is good news for anyone with an SQ decoder, but perhaps less good news for the majority of people, who just want to listen to it on a stereo system!
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Ugo Offline




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Posted: June 08 2008, 19:05

Quote (Korgscrew @ June 08 2008, 16:05)
All they did for the CDs was to take the SQ encoded two channel master and transfer it straight to CD, which is good news for anyone with an SQ decoder, but perhaps less good news for the majority of people, who just want to listen to it on a stereo system!

Maybe this is why the Boxed booklet says "This CD set is in stereo", when it actually isn't - it's in quad. :)

The channel separation works great with a Dolby Pro Logic II decoder, which I have, and which I think it's by now a pretty standard feature of all 5.1 DVD 'home cinema' amplifiers. If you got one of those systems at home, Boxed is definitely worth being listened through that. ;) On the other hand, the DTS mix of Boxed, which is available as various torrents scattered around the Net, is completely different from the quad one, although it's often purported to be the same, or presented as such.

Apart from that, I don't think that the first three albums should be remastered once again. There are already enough versions of them. :D


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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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Korgscrew Offline




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Posted: June 08 2008, 20:05

Quote (Ugo @ June 09 2008, 00:05)
On the other hand, the DTS mix of Boxed, which is available as various torrents scattered around the Net, is completely different from the quad one, although it's often purported to be the same, or presented as such.

Now that's strange. I haven't heard it, so can't comment from that point of view, but I was always under the impression that the DTS versions out there had been done from the SQ encoded CDs using a Fosgate/Tate SQ decoder, which is usually considered the best ever built.

The thing is that there seems to be so much mislabelling when it comes to things like this, that it's hard to say what's really going on here. I know that there are DTS versions of some albums (including Music of the Spheres) which have been created by running them through some kind of pseudo-surround processing, and it's possible that someone's done the same with Boxed.

It's also possible that some of this is down to the differences between SQ and Pro Logic II decoding, though I'm not certain of what the differences are likely to be (other than that there probably are some! ).

I'll see if I can investigate this a bit more...
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Ugo Offline




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Posted: June 09 2008, 07:43

Well, what I do know about the DTS mixed of Boxed is that they're fan-made. I've got them on 3 CD-Rs that Spinne (from this board) sent me. All of them feature very marked differences from the mixes as they're featured on the original CDs. Just to give you one example, the "diddlydiddly" solo in Ommadawn Part 1, which we mentioned a few times here :), goes all around the four (or five) channels on the original Boxed CD, while it stays fixed in the front on the DTS mixes, panning a little bit between left and right (and the panning is blurred). There are many other differences, this is the only one I recall off the top of my head. I don't think that this depends on Pro Logic II being different from SQ - they're different mixes. Whoever did them did much more than decode the SQ mixes - they altered them. ;)

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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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Bassman Offline




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Posted: June 09 2008, 19:56

There's probably very little to be gained from a remaster, apart from increasing or decreasing the highs and lows.  The only other results we could really want are some reduction of tape hiss, and I'm not sure I would want anyone fooling around with the remix masters any further.

Hard to say.


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Turn up the music... Hi as Fi can go.
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lostrom Offline




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Posted: Oct. 14 2008, 19:36

No need for that, the one allready made sounds great. Release the original Hergest Ridge instead!!!
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Ghostmojo Offline




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Posted: April 16 2009, 17:22

Quote (lostrom @ Oct. 14 2008, 19:36)
No need for that, the one allready made sounds great. Release the original Hergest Ridge instead!!!

Absolutely - then all will be right with the world (for a while)

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" ... if you feel a little glum - to Hergest Ridge you should come ... "
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