Steve question: Japanese releases

Firstly, congratulations, as I of course wasn't around for the Main Event.

Secondly...have you ever thought of lending yourself out to some Japanese labels (like Victor or Teichiku) who might want to put some of their material on the SACD medium? Take the Mops albums for example...those're due for another round of reissues any day now, and the notorious Japanese drive for quality might present an interesting employment opportunity.

 

Their own tend to be pretty inconsistent. Actually, given the reputation the Japanese have for audio fetishism/quality concerns, things get amazingly complicated, with good *and* bad discs sometimes coming out of the same batch of reissues.

For example: recently, Toshiba/EMI re-released a few of their titles in their mini-LP series. Some were good. Some were great. The "good" ones had been compressed slightly. Why? I certainly don't know.

Teichiku: great packaging, some great releases, generally poor sound due to a bizarre overuse of some very gauzy NR.

And, needless to say, one of my favorite albums by one of my favorite Japanese bands has the scariest waveform anybody here is likely to see.

 

And for a closer look, see below.

Generalities, eh?

 

Yikes! That's a 2x4!

 

Welcome back, David!

 

Toshiba/EMI seems to rely more on Abbey Road in the UK for their remastering lately (e.g. Queen and Jethro Tull albums).

For jazz, they seem to do some tweaking of their own; as an indication, Japanese CDs of Rudy Van Gelder Blue Note remasters appear to sound different from US RVGs.

 

what artist is this?

 

Ouch! My ears are hurting just looking at those screen dumps.

 

I haven't looked at it on the PC (I'm kind of scared to, actually), but I got a copy of the recent Japan-only Matthew Sweet album. Just by listening to it it's painfully obvious that it's cranked to (and beyond) the limit. Really ugly-sounding -- loud, distorted, smooshed, homogenized. Shame, because there's some nice music hiding in there somewhere.

Ryan

 

David, what program did you use to view the waveforms?