Is it just me that is finding the sound mix poor.
You make the same point that Rob makes about the mix and I'm inclined to agree with it. It’s something that we’ve been discussing more broadly at home a lot recently.
I’ve previously mentioned that I‘d binned all my vinyl years ago. Well, it turns out that when we went through part of the garage a while ago we found a box that contained a few albums. To the delight of my eldest it contained all of my Joy Division and New Order collection** (with the exception of PC&L which very annoyingly was awol), the vast majority of The Smiths, and a fair few other old albums he’s been listening to; all of which seemed to be in better nick than I remember keeping them tbf.
He was so chuffed with the find that we got him a turntable for Christmas, and I dug out an old but ok TEAC amp and pair of Celestion speakers for his room. Overall, nothing fancy but when he and his friends put the first album on they were completely blown away by what they were hearing and with each album they listened to they were amazed by the level and nature of the detail they were hearing. As many of them play instruments there was immediate discussion about what they were hearing versus what they were used to hearing. He, like most of his friends has mostly been listening to music by streaming, either through his reasonably high spec earbuds or when we’re in the car.
Anyway, in a somewhat geeky fashion, they started comparing these albums to some of the other versions on other formats, including several supposed remasters of some of them. Their conclusion was that the quality of the versions they’d been previously listening to was all over the place, this included many of the efforts at remastering for newer formats some of which they thought had made things worse rather than better.
This got me thinking that I listen to a lot of the nominations in the car with a not very good set up or through my computer which currently has pretty crap monitors attached too. So, I’m often listening to source music that either hasn’t been remastered at all for the format I’m listening to or hasn’t been remastered that well. I suspect this creates quite a different experience to the nominator who may own and plays their nominated album in its original format. I thought about trying to dig out the CD of this weeks pick because I suspect I’m losing a decent amount of detail and tone along the way. If you are using free Spotify even the max quality bitrate is one where people will be able to differentiate between it and other formats; I think only the Spotify premium VH quality setting really eliminates this issue. I mostly use YT music and the HQ setting should eliminate that issue but i'm pretty sure it automatically adjusts the bitrate e.g. if i'm listening out and about.
It won’t make much difference for many picks and thinking back to Rob’s preferences I think with a lot of US releases more effort was/is put in to making sure music sounds good in a wide variety of (less sophisticated) formats partly as a result of the more diverse and demanding nature of radio stations in the US. However, I think there’s probably a whole raft of UK indie music that has never been revisited and just loses some of its qualities when played in most streaming contexts. This could be a complete load of bollocks but I did have a sense with this week’s pick that I was missing something from what I remember about it.
** On the NO front, elder son was raving about hearing the NO 1981-1982 EP as it was ‘supposed to sound’ and declared it possibly the greatest thing he’d ever heard, I explained there was a bloke on the thread who planned to be buried with his copy and he just nodded in a ‘well of course’ sort of way. Unprompted he then said Thieves Like Us was probably it's equal and you'd have to take that with you too!!!!! Might have to get some DNA testing done with a certain transatlantic poster :-)
