Prince - Purple Rain Deluxe Edition 2017

The errors can't be so "glaring" when folks are legitimately looking for them and can't find them!
The "Erotic City" dropout is that weird guitar noise at the beginning and can be easily fixed. Same with the brief dropout in Computer Blue. A little shoddy, but not "glaring."

And I think it's a big presumption to say that less single edits would've resulted in more rarities. The way they separated everything, it would've simply resulted in a shorter "B-sides & Edits" disc.

 

I agree with you. I haven't received my set yet, but I from everything I've read so far, it appears that WB did not have access to the Vault for the outtakes. Maybe that was all they could scrape together in decent quality.

 

Prince didn't supply WB with any outtakes or alternative takes only the 2015 remaster? WB had to use what they already had in the WB archive? Universal bought the rights to the Paisley Park vault.

 

It’s Official: Prince’s Estate Manager and Universal Music Group Move to Nullify Recorded-Music Deal

Universal Gets To Peek at Warner's Contract With Prince

 

Prince was too prolific and hard working for us all to be happy
With the song selection for the vault disc. He had so many original songs and diff versions often of each. I love 'we can f' but the 1986 version is better...

I could do without Velvet and replace it with All Day All Night which is a smoker.


The remaster job is so so bad. A friend just sent me a Kevin Gray remaster from 2011...i will try that out.

 

Wasn't going to bother with this after seeing the Let's Go Crazy waveform but £17 was too good an offer to miss. Listening to the Amazon autorip while waiting for the physical copy to arrive and I'm so glad I changed my mind, the bonus discs alone are worth at least that.

The main album is, to my ears, compressed too much but the EQ isn't bad and the extra bottom end helps give some tracks a bit more weight. As for Let's Go Crazy, listen to the bv "let's go" chant at 3:11. On the original it jumps out at you, on the remaster the volume actually dips into an overloaded distorted mess at that same point.

I wouldn't say better but they do have more bottom end and are a bit louder, though thankfully not to the same amount that the main disc suffers from. They're certainly not disagreeable.

 

Stellar post. Just listening on a pair of 'generic' Sony headphones and 'streaming' the album via youtube bitrate and I must have forgot how specifically musical and creatively awesome the album is as I am enjoying, loving much of what I am hearing. So much attention to detail in these songs and recordings, like the tinkling music box keyboard runs that track through a verse of the Doves. I had forgotten just how much electric guitar is on this record. Amazing, The screaming, screeching, and wailing guitar solos and vocal aren't slicing or bleeding through my ears on my first listen to the remaster. Prince and Purple Rain put a big grin and happy face on me and it's of an infectious kind. A tour de force of an album with 'preludes' and 'afterwords' as well.

 

Yeah, oddly enough the only place I can listen to squashed dynamics without making my ears bleed is in the car on its stock player. Otherwise, certainly not on cans, and it doesn't translate on speakers well, either. Most of my listening is now in my dedicated listening room on speakers.

So, yeah, I can hear the tunes in my ride, and it's good for jamming, but who does critical listening in their car, anyway?

If it is, it's a rip off, because it's downsampled, as the original masted studio files were 24/192 (probably 64/192 or 32/192, but I wouldn't take 24/96 over commercial 24/192, anyway).

 

I wouldn't call it a rip off. Many vendors offer both because many people feel that 24/96 is more than enough. A lot of older DACs and some connections can't even handle more than 24/96.

But if you think it isn't worth your money, don't buy it. I was only trying to help.

 

I doubt that 99% of the people on the planet could really hear the difference between a 24/192K file and a 24/96K file, especially of music from the era 1984.

 

I don't think anyone can objectively differentiate between 24/96 and 24/192 on hardware that supports both and with identical masterings. Complete waste of hard drive space, IMO. There's no way this compressed recording in particular needs 24 bits of dynamic range. The price increase associated with the privilege of downloading a bigger file is an insult as well with how expensive these digital files already are compared to the identical mastering available for cheaper on CD.

/rant

 

Isn't the 7" version just an early fade of the album mix? Could there be anything easier to 'fake'?

 

Bonus material

 

Well, you guys are right. You can't hear the difference. 24-bit depth is somewhere in the realm of 155db dynamic range (give or take - I don't have the numbers in front of me as I'm on holiday). I would argue that decoding a full 16-bit is still within the realm of theory, depending on what technology you buy into.

Still, it's a matter of principle. Don't try to sell me a truncated file when I know good and well what the transfer rate is when it came off of the machine. It's the same thing with upsampled audio. Elvis is Back! on DSD. They never transferred that to DXD; Acoustic Sounds is ripping people off.

The ONLY reason I have ever purchased "hi-rez" is for a unique remastering, anyway. Otherwise, I would buy it on RBCD and be on my merry way.

It's just a matter of principle, is all.

Of course there are a lot of modern recordings recorded at a high sampling rate, and then truncated to 16/44.1, but I just don't listen to a lot of modern stuff because of the mastering.

 

Ok, I got my Deluxe set today and just finished watching the DVD. I'm so happy to finally have this concert. Sure, the picture quality isn't great, but the sound is pretty good and that's the important thing.

And man, the "Purple Rain" performance at the end is just EPIC.

I got this set as a present for my 49th birthday and it makes me feel like being 16 again. "Purple Rain" might just be the most important album in my life.

 

Please, no fakery. That's the biggest possible insult. I prefer a 24/96 needle drop of a 7" single to trickery.

If needle drops are good enough for filling in the loose ends on CD box sets by Lou Reed, Judy Garland, and David Bowie, they're good enough for WDC.

 

I reordered the tracks on disc 3 in iTunes to A-Side/B-Side, followed by the 12" mixes, in order of release (according to Wikipedia).

 

Anyone else notice how the stereo sounds wider on the extended version of Another Lonely Christmas, compared to the 7"?

 

I noticed this right away compared to the vinyl rip I have. I just figured the vinyl rip had track bleed issues but upon listening to the 7" version I notice the hard panning isn't there either. Not sure what happened here. It does make OOPSing experiments more interesting though.

 

I don't have the new set yet, but I didn't notice any stereo field differences when comparing the 7" edit on Hits/B-Sides and my 12" vinyl. The EQ, however, is extremely bright on the 12".

 

Yes, the 7" is just an early fade of the LP version. I really don't consider it "faking" if they started with the LP version and matched the fade again. It would theoretically sound better, as it would be one generation less than the actual single master tape.

 

Wow!.......... We Can F$ck is great!

 

It really is! After having the bad quality snippet for so many years, I was super excited to hear it in full! For me, it's like the dirty sister to Do Me, Baby and Automatic.

 

The amazing thing is that I assumed it was a George Clinton song, since he sang it on 'Graffiti Bridge' and it sounded like a song he would write. Never knew that Prince actually wrote the song. Maybe he was channeling his 'Inner George Clinton'? I really like this Prince version, and how it is different enough to now have 2 Great Takes now on the same song.

 

There's 8 takes of it in internet land. The most significant is the 1986 version which is very different to the 1983 and 1989 versions.