Spooky Tooth box.

BTW the entire box set is also available on iTunes in the Mastered for iTunes series. It has full dynamic range on iTunes - no limiting whatsoever on the titles I looked at.

I downloaded It's All About from Qobuz in CD resolution. This too has far more dynamic range than the previous versions I've seen, the 2008 Universal mastering and the old Edsel. I must say I find this one a bit hard to enjoy - the sound quality is terrible, as if it was recorded in the garage by a bunch of kids with a cassette recorder. As with Spooky Two, I'm wondering whether this version is a flat transfer because there doesn't seem to have been any attempt to soften the harsh sound or deal with the often bizarre EQ of the original. I think it would have been very time-consuming indeed to have mastered every track for optimum sound quality and even then it would still have sounded pretty bad, so maybe they just threw their hands up in despair and decided to go with the flat transfer.

 

I'm really wanting this now!

 

I did, a little bird recommended it to me years ago, I really think it can be improved upon.

 

I know a lot of people are irritated by charts and I'm not going to bombard you but here's an example of why I think It's All About could be a flat transfer. In the following chart, I've compared the EQ of the old Edsel CD with the EQ of the newly remastered CD. What I want to draw your attention to is the orange line with orange dots because that's the EQ of the Edsel relative to the new CD - or to put it another way, the orange line shows you what EQ you'd have to apply to the new CD if you wanted to make it sound like the Edsel.



My point is that the EQ of the Edsel (in green) is very different from that of the new CD (in white), and in quite a bizarre way - the Edsel has huge notches at 2kHz and 12kHz, relative to the new CD. So, one of them has been very aggressively mastered. Listening to the Edsel against the new CD, there's no doubt in my mind that it's the Edsel that's been aggressively mastered and that those notches were a largely unsuccessful attempt to improve on the appalling sound quality . So that's why I think the new CD is a flat transfer - I think maybe they decided that the original master was so far beyond help that no amount of mastering could save it so they decided to make a virtue of necessity and leave us to hear for ourselves what came out of the recording studio.

All just idle speculation, of course.

 

Very sorry, I omitted to say in the last post that the chart shows the EQ comparison for the track Bubbles, not the entire CD. The EQ differences vary widely from one track to the next - this was just one example.

On a different theme, I noticed a strange thing about the track Tobacco Road.

Just before the end, in the grand finale, a snippet of the following track, It Hurts You So, has been inserted.

Here it is. You hear a drum fill, then the snippet from It Hurts You So, then the exact same recording of the drum fill again only this time slightly louder, and then the close.

(Just click to play. There's nothing to download.)

End of Tobacco Road from new CD

It's the same on the Edsel version so it must have been intentional. Very silly, though.

In fact, the Edsel version is quite a bit longer because after the close, it repeats the last 20 seconds of the track - in other words, you get the last 20 seconds twice over, starting with the snippet from It Hurts You So. The last 20 seconds isn't different the second time around - it's just the same piece of tape played twice over. Here it is:

End of Tobacco Road from Edsel CD

Crazy days. I wonder which version is the original?

 

Hope some tireless archivist finds the rest of this performance someday...

Timeline experts:
The festival date of June 1, 1967 would mean this is Art not the V.I.P.s ? Or did that happen later in the year with the LP release?

 

One year prior for good measure...anyone hear the rumor that Hendrix asked them to join forces?




Glad the French powers that be actually valued their TV content. The wholesale destruction of culture by their British and American counterparts is breathtakingly avaricious and short-sighted.

 

One Complaint:
They left off a number of bonus tracks from the previous set of re-issues:
Its all about: Sunshine Help me (single version)
Bubbles (mono single version)
The Last Puff: I've got enough heartache (B-side)

They could have also put on the US b-side Spooky Blow.

edit: I think Spooky blow is just an edit of Luger's Groove

 

I'm torn. I have original UK vinyl and a couple of the singles. A little spendy, I have all the later albums, so it really is just the first three and bonus tracks that interest me

 

Don't know much about this band other than a few songs. However I just rolled the dice and purchased the box set.

 

Wizard, you will not be disappointed.

 

Thanks. I have a greatest hits collection but interested in hearing more. Good reviews pushed me to buy.

 

'Spooky Two' and 'The Last Puff' are incredible albums.

 

I think 'It's All About' and 'You Broke My Heart...So I Busted Your Jaw' and 'The Mirror' are as well!

'Spooky Two' is an impeccable masterpiece.

 

I am mistaken, the earlier set was mastered by Ben Wiseman and I can safely say the new box sounds much nicer. Listening to Spooky Two now and it is the best version I have heard on CD.

Note to YBYB - be kind.

 

Agre

Agreed. Witness is a most underrated album. One of my fav bands from the 70's. Have all their albums on vinyl except for the live stuff. Very tempted on this one though.

 

£45 that worked out ok for me. I tried to find all the singles, but looking for anything on Island in the UK is futile

 

I am really enjoying this set.

 

How does the Spooky Two songs sound compared to other digital versions? I have a Japanese reissue from a few years back and it's a bit juiced.

 

See post #37. Spooky Two is the other end of the scale from the Japanese reissue.

 

I was hoping to stir up additional comments besides the one or two posts regarding that particular group of songs.

 

How are the bonus tracks? What about the mono single mixes of the Spooky Two tracks?

 

If you go to Qobuz, you can hear for yourself, completely free - there are long samples from absolutely every track in the collection, all 115 of them.

 

Groovy. I'll check it out

 

I was listening to this set on Spotify and thought it sounded very nice. Some, actually quite a bit of this music I have not heard before but both the sound and music was impressive overall.