New Springsteen Box "Album Collection '73-'84'" (Part Two)

was he listening to the remastered catalogue?

 

Ugh. C'mon, man.

 

I agree, not funny.

 

wrong. wrong. wrong. funny. But wrong.

 

That escalated quickly.

 

Yeah, not the best week for judgment and taste around the forum, imo.

On topic, these remasters have pulled Greetings and The River back into albums I will actually pull up and play sometimes, over the live stuff and various era-specific playlists I've made. I guess always having something better to do than remaster the old albums finally paid off ... waited so long that Plangent became an option. Early Christmas for Garry Tallent! But for the moment, spin #2 for The River ...

 

Been meaning to ask: Can anyone make the case for upgrading Nebraska?
I just haven't been able to imagine it's got the same potential for improvement as some of the others.

 

I just put on the Darkness on vinyl on my RP6, 2M Bronze, Nait 5i-2 and Dynaudio X14 setup. Have an early EX press from before. Holy crap! This is a huge improvement really. Specially the low end. Totally silent and flat. Nice pressing. Goosebumps warning

One problem though. Side B looked like this. Should I start a claim? I will assume they cannot change only this record..

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ps3omeea57lwake/Bruce.jpg?dl=0

 

Received my EU-Vinyl-Box today. It looks so excellent. The Booklet alone is it worth to think about an purchase, they payed so much attention to details. Love it really.
All records look perfect pressed by MPO in France. I know them mainly for there good work with Electronic-Music-LP-Pressings.
Was it mentioned that all LP´s were cut by Chris Bellman?

Haven´t had a chance to listen, but what looks so nice maybe doesn´t sound that bad.

 

My dog likes Dolby A masters when I play them without decoding.

 

I am awaiting my box from Amazon.ca (which now is on target to arrive on Dec.1). I borrowed my friend's River. Put simply, I think it is a big improvement over my original CD. Sounds full and rich. If the others in this box are as much improved, I will be quite happy.

 

I find this really really difficult to get to grips with.......I would be seriously worried about the ability of my system if I were you.....

 

Well...it does sound better but better is a relative term. It is what it is. There's more detail evident for what its worth. The playback and remastering this time around corrected some errors that occurred the first time around due to the source recording.

 

Two basic questions about the vinyl version of the reissue box.

Do the new records sound significantly better than the original ones?

And to single one album out, have they improved the bright sonics of The River?

 

So the new 'River' is brighter and louder, yet you prefer it to the old one?

"More detail evident" is what I usually see people say when they release something squashed and significantly brighter than before. That's what they said here when the awful-sounding 2-cd Traveling Wilburys set was released.

You just un-sold me on this set.

 

Well, it's your loss. This is a magnificent-sounding set (on CD at least), and it walks all over the previous versions. It's done RIGHT and with care.

 

I've listened to it on a good set up not in the car.

There are core issues with the production of this record-he went for a thin new wave/punk era sound-remastering can't change that.

It's not overly loud the DR numbers are higher than some of the rest of the set.

It has more clarity, more separation and more detail but above all the bass is massively improved meaning there is some offset to the overall production issues.

It is a very good improvement on the previous CD.

 

Yep there were danger signs in that post, but do remember even on this forum the majority of folks love all things labelled remastered. At times those folks are less vocal, but in these new issues threads they tend to come out en masse. The important thing is knowing what type of sound oneself likes and if looking to save coin the danger phrases in reviews.

 

Done right is only a subjective opinion so not his loss. He appears to know exactly what he likes in terms of sounds quality so the only loss if he is correct is his currency. Granted he should at least give a listen but not every one has unlimited funds to take a chance. Of course there are other ways of obtaining, but that would bring out the holier than thou crowd and derail this thread into yet another pointless and totally ponderous debate on downloading.

 

Nice interview with Toby Scott, Springsteen's longtime audio engineer about the process, as well as Tracks 2 and Bruce's 600 or so unreleased songs: http://www.backstreets.com/news.html.

Someone's summary on Backstreet's forum:

"1) 1,000+ titles are in the audio vault. The vault, at least the audio vault, is a storage drive. He did not comment about the video vault -- (so no information here about where THE vault is or what it looks like). For those wondering where the 600 number that NS81 mentioned came from, Toby says that if you add up every song Bruce has released and remove duplicates, it adds up to around 400. 1000-400=600.

2) Bruce has -- as he told Brad Serling -- been all over YouTube, and when he sends Toby out on searches to find things, a lot of them have come from things Bruce found on YouTube. So-- and this part wasn't in the interview -- if the person who put up [I'm picking a song at random here] Fugitive's Dream on YouTube is a BTX member -- Bruce may have seen your upload and asked Toby Scott about it!

3) Bruce has ordered/purchased/acquired(?) bootleg DVDs (that's what Toby said) and comes to Toby and asks what is this. This led Toby, with a laugh, to tell TC that he wonders out loud sometimes that when/if Bruce purchases bootlegs from bootleg companies, does he give his real name?

4) Bruce had him work on a project -- no details given -- six months ago that saw him scour up over 100 titles that were multi-track recordings and could be turned into something. Toby gave him the list, Bruce said that list was too long for him to comprehend, so Toby is now in the process of pairing that list down to 50-100 titles. The box set and some other stuff has had Toby push that project to the side and he will get back on it soon.

5) If you have any interest in mastering, the recording process, or this process for the remastering, listen to this interview.

6) If you like the way The River NOW sounds, thank Bob Ludwig.

7) Tracks 2 (confirmed by Toby when prompted by TC, so this is now three confirmations -- two from Bruce, one from Toby -- that the project exists) is one of several projects (no details given) that he is working on at the moment.

Is there a box set volume 2 coming? Sony/Columbia has told Landau they are looking forward to volume 2 and Toby thus presumes it will happen.

9) Toby revealed that awhile back Landau asked him to "revamp" (his words, not mine) Bruce's catalog. This was apparently in response to the critics -- including fans -- who have gotten on Bruce, Inc for poor/inferior/not the best it could be sounding releases. Landau wanted Toby to start from the beginning (i.e. Greetings era), organize things, and see what they could do. So Toby and Bob Ludwig have been teaming up to try and see what they can do. For the analog albums, this was easy. Use the plangent process, get them sounding great, and that's what got released.

Now for TOL on, the stuff recorded to digital, you can't do anything about a CD (he then gave some technical terms that I didn't quite understand...others will) but because hard drive storage is cheap and broadband has come a long way, they are very interested in remastering recent stuff and using the available HR-HD formats. This seems to be their next frontier in accomplishing Landau's mission.

He mentioned the Neil Young website/initiative Pono -- and he revealed (remember that this was Sunday), that fans will be able to buy the album and use the HD-HR streaming websites, BS.net (what became live.BS.net), iTunes and maybe HDtracks(?) to hear this stuff. It started with the boxset (that's what we saw announced/released Monday), and then he thinks they'll just move forward chronologically on this when the record company wants them to. (BTW I think some of the recent albums were released in those HD-HR formats on Monday. I'd expect that work to continue).

10) Per "the computer" -- that's the laptop Bruce carries with him on tour that holds "every song he's ever recorded": I now believe Bruce was slightly exaggerating on that statement. Per what Toby said, I came away with the feeling that the laptop holds every song Bruce KNOWS he ever recorded. It sure seems like Bruce has forgotten about a bunch of songs, and that when he goes onto YouTube and starts fumbling around and finding stuff, he makes more discoveries, sends Toby to find the stuff, and (once they're found) gets them added to "the computer."

I do think that for the Reunion Era albums that have seen no leaks and obviously a much better organization in terms of cataloging that stuff, all of those songs are probably on "the computer."

11) The story about how Zimny had an inferior sounding version of either Racing or The Promise to open the Darkness documentary is pretty interesting. Not sure how Thom was given a version other than the master.

So that's the crux of what was newsy about this interview.

There was: 1) NO mention of what's next and 2) NO mention of a River boxset (though a good amount of talk about The River album, both its original recording and the remaster."

 

The first thing I do when someone arrives at a different conclusion from mine is look at their system that's not because of snobbery but because in my experience building and changing a system through levels of performance allows you to hear the differences in recordings and indeed what a system can deliver. Of course we all have preferences in the type of sound, we also have different capabilities in terms of hearing and indeed what we listen for. You do this enough over the years and you learn all kinds of things-you also realise there is no end either in terms of the journey or what you learn.

This forum is superb but it takes filtering-we've had an expert on these recordings (in the previous part of this thread) tell us on how the approach was set out and what we should be hearing. If we can't hear that then fine but unfortunately people take stances based on......I'm not sure exactly either misread quotes or personal preferencess but often themselves filtering out very good information-as is the case in this thread-from people who've sat down and listened to the discs and tried to share what they've heard...........

 

I agree with latter and would caution the former. It is more subtle this time. You cannot treat this with the same lens of past remasters. My experience is the clarity comes from the Plangent Process and not compression or EQ. You have to be more open to searching this out for yourself and not relying on… well somebody said something on SHF, and that has worked for me in the past. I hate to sound preachy, but I am just saying it is worth it to consider this differently than most every other example around here.

I only really have experience with BTR, the original, the 30th an now this box. Let me go on record that I was a touring Deadhead when Springsteen was MTV huge, and into Genesis, Yes and King Crimson before that; and so, how shall I put this delicately, there was to my mind very little intersection for these sets of artists or at least their fan bases. So Springsteen is an artist placed squarely in my I respect tremendously more than I like, listen to intently every time its on the car radio, never have seen him live, probably should have seen him live at some point because it sure looks like quite a show, sure if they finally get his CDs right after hearing how troublesome they were from folks around here—including my buying the 30th BTR and boom I’m done with how they remaster his stuff—maybe someday they will finally get it right… so yeah here I am giving this a twirl.

So back on point. I find Allmusic does a very good job of posting samples of exactly the master of each version. You can compare an original vs. a deluxe edition and usually get a good gauge most of the time. I am finding it is the case here as well. Others might disagree with me, and I am not the biggest fan of making decisions based on samples, and I am a/bing these on computer speakers, but I still find this is pretty illustrative of what is going on here; so if you have not checked out samples yet try this: open the links below in different windows and back and forth 'em. To me it gets to my point on what I found on my proper rig with BTR but just to a larger degree, the greater darkness of the background now, from what seems more from the Plangent Process than jacked up compression or EQ, is what drives the clarity and my like for this box set and presumably a fair amount of others around here as well. Note first that the tracks don’t line up exactly, but I find the effect stands.

Maybe try “Backstreets”, “She’s The One”, or “Thunder Road”
BTR Not sure what version.
BTR Album Collection Vol.1

Maybe try “Incident On 57th Street”, “Kitty’s Back”, “The E Street Shuffle”, “Rosalita”
WIESS Not sure what version.
WIESS Album Collection Vol.1

 

There will never be consensus on these remasters. The main reason will be the DR numbers which are higher on the original releases. The fact that these remasters are louder and are more compressed will not be acceptable for all listeners.

As a longtime springsteen fan I love the new remasters. Major imporvements for Greetings, The river and Born in the USA. The kick drum on Born in the USA is amazing. I have probably heard the album a thousand times but this new version gives it a new Rock attitude. More Bass and better stereo separation make it a new listening experience.

 

Ask for a second dog advice.

 

The albums that are in this box set are now available at 24bit/44.1kHz high resolution from Springsteen's official website, although I fully agree with you that they should be 24bit/96kHz and not 24/44.1, except maybe The River as that was a digital mix-down master. The rest were analogue mix masters. The new EQd masters done by Bob Ludwig are 24/96.

The rest of the catalogue is also available on there at 16bit/44.1kHz full CD quality. For all albums you can chose between either FLAC or ALAC.

http://live.brucespringsteen.net/catalog.aspx?type=albums