Heathen 1. "Sunday" 4:47 2. "Slip Away" 6:14 3. "Afraid" 3:25 4. "Slow Burn" 5:04 1. "5:15 The Angels Have Gone" 5:25 2. "Everyone Says 'Hi'" 3:56 3. "A Better Future" 3:56 4. "Heathen (The Rays)" 4:13 Prefer the Moby mix of Sunday; I like the Kate Bush drums and the synths lifted from Ashes To Ashes at the end.
I'd add "A Small Plot Of Land" instead of "Wishful Beginnings" and "Voyeur" instead of "Oxford Town" (not necessarily keep them in this order)...
No, of course it isn't obvious. What IS obvious is that is was introduced BEFORE the mastering stage. The reason no other mastering has it is that they werent remixed from the original tapes with THAT attempted fix. For the avoidance of doubt, I am referring to the mastering stage as that point when the mix is committed to a master plate/cd or whatever. Perhaps you are mistakenly conflating REmastering and mastering, as REmastering includes the process of cleaning up and remixing etc?
Even if the mistake didn’t occur in the mastering phase (which I believe I did), the place that any mixing errors of this type is fixed is in the mastering phase. It’s a mastering problem. They were the last ones to touch it, and this was Visconti’s “fix”. Sorry.
"I like a little country" David Bowie and remember Stateside? The worst five minutes of Bowie's career.
Lol. Just think about what you said. It is in no way a mastering problem, even with your scenario it would be a QA problem. The ONLY way it would be a "mastering problem" is if that volume drop was INTRODUCED DURING THE MASTERING PROCESS. And lets not try and move goalposts, it was (is?) claimed that it was a mastering ERROR - not "problem". A good analogy here would be if someone made a hits compilation and there was a track which was not a hit, you'd be claiming that was also a mastering problem because it was at that stage the tracks were set before printing.
I tend to agree. That does' Errors cause problems and problems cause errors, so let's not worry about that. Of course this was introduced into the remastering by Visconti, or a member of his team. But where is he? *crickets*
His re-recording of Repetition for a BBC Radio session in 1997 was almost there. But yeah, not really
if i had a fly on my face and i chose to kill it with a hammer - i'd call that a mistake. basically you have a problem, which is the drop - and their solution, which is the mistake. edit: oh, and also what they did for the rest of the track, which is totally up in the air - as it's impossible to work out what happened there. i wonder if the fixed fix will still have the rest of the track behaving in the same way it does on this release? that'll be the next interesting development in all of this
It’s absolutely a mastering problem. They were presented with an issue to solve...which is what happens at every mastering session if you’ve paid any attention to anything our host has been saying. It’s their job to solve that problem seemlessly. Visconti and Staff absolutely failed here. Their “fix” was the equivalent of patching a pothole with a bucket of oatmeal.
Guess what? There's a 'temporary loss of energy' in the '91 remaster of "Heroes" too, check out the left channel of "Beauty and the Beast" at 3:05
I remember a huge buzz about the Ryko releases. Displays in stores, posters, magazine articles. Used Bowie vinyl of the RCA years had been hard to come by since it went OOP. Remember, this predated slightly the mass move to CDs and the mass dumping of vinyl collections on the market. It took over a year of weekly digging for me to assemble an RCA collection on vinyl. Then the CDs came out with bonus tracks and I bought them all again, after buying Sound + Vision on vinyl. Thankfully, I skipped the EMI reissues. I knew nothing about how they sounded at the time, but I remember looking at them and thinking, “wow, lame packaging, no bonus tracks”. Little did I know they’d be in print for the better part of two decades.
The Beatles in Mono vinyl box. I agree they’re thin on the ground, though. But when a product is advertised as “Audiophile 180g vinyl”, we have a right to expect more. And yes, I know, Parlophone would say that the part that was audiophile was the thickness and weight of the records themselves, not the presentation of the music.
Holy Smokes! Bowie wearing a flannel shirt?!? Actually I'm wearing one right now but I'm an old mid-west working class white guy
But he appears to be at home. A lot of the dress-up in public is probably just show biz. A guy wants to be comfortable at home, you know?
I agree - the mistake, or error, was the solution they employed to fix the fly problem. With this analogy you smashing the hammer into your face is the automated compensation gubbings they used to come up with the finalised track, prior to it being mastered. Which was my point. Calling it a "mastering error" is suggesting a machine somewhere had an unforeseen glitch which nobody expected or wanted. I believe them when they said they chose the hammer solution, regardless of whether that was the correct choice or not.
ok, yeah - i see what you mean. i still think it's a bit iffy on whether they actually achieved what they wanted to do, myself - just from how bad it sounds, and also just my gut general feeling these things do seem like they weren't played back as whole songs and albums - because sonically they nearly all sound off, and fatiguing to listen to for long stretches of time. Psychoacoustics, that sort of thing, they seem draining to me when listening for too long so my instinct is to think they never sat back and looked at the bigger picture with anything - which in itself could result in the issues with heroes. Anyway, so you're saying: They did exactly what they wanted to do, and listened to it and thought it was ok - but it was a mistake them thinking that it was ok. Whilst others are saying: They meant to achieve something else, and therefore the result was a mistake in and of itself (and what they did do went unnoticed). or am i still getting that wrong?
If you’ve seen just about any later day interview with him, you know that Bowie the guy is a lot different than Bowie the rock star.
