Yea....they do use the word "remastering" for whatever reason. Look at how they dicked around the Door's fans with the Matrix tapes. They blatantly lie about this stuff all time. I predict, after all is said and done, there will be no decipherable upgrade in sound quality, as it relates to this new remaster.
I am not seeing it that way, but rather someone benignly interchanged mastering with remastering which isn't that uncommon. I can't see Kevin Gray really wanting to do this if he couldn't use all the mastering tools he normally would to make it sound great. The Beach Boys AP SACDs say Mastered as well in the copy, and Gray talks about some mastering moves he did on those where needed. Now I recognize it might not be the best tape of all time, and frankly the CD I have from the Bearsville box I quite enjoy as is, but if anyone can get a more audiophile level experience out of it I'd put my money on Kevin. In fact I'm going to play my new Gilded Palace Of Sin SACD by him to remind myself what he can do!
AWATS sounds very good on the consumer reel-to-reel tape. Plenty of bass. Way better than the original LP, or even the 2-disc re-issue. If all they found was the master tapes used to create the consumer tapes, Kevin still may be able to do his magic and we'll finally have a great-sounding AWATS on CD. BTW, does anyone know if the original studio tapes are really missing, or are they just unplayable because of all the physical edits Todd did?
I believe only one side of AWATS is missing the original tapes but I can't remember where I read that. Would love to hear about Kevin Gray's mastering process considering it seems he has applied the same technique to many vintage analog recordings!
The listing for Something/Anything? has finally appeared on amazon dot c'eh. Pre-or-dered. It's a great album. For some reason, I'm thinking of "Sounds of the Studio". Headphones out... and cranked up!
Just ordered from Deep Discount. They are having a 15% off sale (EGGNOG). With discount the prices are: Wizard: 19.41 Something: 24.62 Free shipping over $25
Thank you for the info. I had to use Firefox to place my order because the site kept freezing up when I tried both Chrome (my usual browser) and Edge.
Rats. I just pre-ordered yesterday. These two albums were re-mastered in 2011 on Edsel Records, correct? I wonder if the SACDs will sound better - I bought the Edsels and liked them quite a bit.
I'm actually happy with the Edsel releases. Great packaging and bonus material. Unfortunately, I missed out on a couple Utopias.
So the new release date for S/A is Jan 19th? Or it's delayed until a week after that? It will be very interesting how much Kevin Gray can improve on Wizard's sound.
