The Headswirlers comp is fairly uniform mid-resolution. I have some of the albums the tracks are originally on and they all sound noticeably better than the comp.
The thing is, one can make a better psych comp than virtually anything listed in this thread from one's own collection. Finding a box set with songs by the Beatles, Cream, Doors, Hendrix, Airplane, Dead, etc is pretty much impossible because of licensing. I'd suggest buying a few of these various artists boxes, then augmenting them with your fave psych artists who don't allow their music to be used for such projects.
One of my favorite series is Chocolate Soup For Diabetics, Vols. 1-5. The best set of British psych/freakbeat I've ever come across. Just about everything here is a killer.
I cherry-picked the set saving the best as lossless digital files and got rid of it because it had numerous mastering errors and dodgy sound on many tracks.
If you're speaking of the Nuggets box sets from RHINO, they're very compressed. The three original single RHINO CDs Nuggets, More Nuggets, And Even More Nuggets slays the boxes in sound quality.
Peephole in My Brain: The British Progressive Pop Sound of 1971 Lullabies For Catatonics: A Journey Through the British Avant-Pop/Art Rock Scene 1967-74 World Psychedelic Classics 3-Love's a Real Thing-The Funky Fuzzy Sounds Of West Africa The Get Easy! Sunshine Pop Collection Tokyo Flashback: Psychedelic Speed Freaks The Rubble Series A Slight Disturbance in My Mind: The British Proto-Psychedelic Sounds of 1966 Where the Action Is! Los Angeles Nuggets 1965-1968 Hallucinations: Psychedelic Pop Nuggets From The Wea Vaults Come Join My Orchestra: The British Baroque Pop Sound 1967-1973 The Amorphous Androgynous: The Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind Let's Go Down & Blow Our Minds: The British Psychedelic Sounds Of 1967 Real Life Permanent Dreams: A Cornucopia of British Psychedelia (1965-1970) Venezuela 70: Cosmic Visions of a Latin American Earth: Venezuelan Experimental Rock in the 1970s All Kinds of Highs: A Mainstream Pop-Psych Compendium 1966-70 Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From The First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 Try A Little Sunshine: The British Psychedelic Sounds of 1969 Fairytales Can Come True: UK Popsike From The Late 60's Making Time: A Shel Talmy Production Up All Night: 20 Heavy Nuggets From The Golden Age Of Hard Psych ....those will get ya started!
People don't buy these comps for the Beatles, Cream, Doors, Hendrix, Airplane etc though. That's the stuff that everyone knows and has heard a million times -and if you hadn't, you'd just get their albums anyway. The joy of V/A comps is discovering obscurities made by acts that never made worthwhile albums or who were otherwise forgotten in the mists of time.
Not sure anyone has mentioned the six volume Circus Days yet. Obscure and sound quality perhaps not top tier, but some wonderful, whimsical UK psychedelia. Available as a box set at a reasonable price.
The original Lenny Kaye 2LP USA Nuggets was a treasure chest in the early seventies. Is that still the best for s o n i c s?
Books related ? Vernon Joynson:Tapestry Of Delights ( expanded 2 volume) is absolutely essential purchase. It’s two enormous thick doorstoppers hardbacke books.. so don’t let your Granny ( takes a Trip) try and bend down and try and pick it up from the DHL morning delivery.
This is an excellent set, but keep in mind that everything on these CDs are needle-drops of the original Bam-Caruso LPs as issued in the 80's/90's. They are pretty good sounding for the most part, but tracks that are MONO on the Bam-Caruso LPs have been transferred in STEREO. You could spend a lot of time summing the channels for a cleaner mono signal (or just hit that mono switch on your amp), but the best sound, IMO, is found on the original eleven-volume Bam-Caruso CDs (see Various - The Rubble Collection 1 for volume one). The music on these CDs are in many cases taken from tapes and not vinyl, although there are still a lot of needle-drops albeit in higher quality than the 20 CD box set as you get rid of an additional vinyl step.
Thought a while back I read the original 1-11 cds had a better sound than the 20 cd boxset thx for the confirmation ☀️ . The individual 1990s Rubble CDs weren’t cheap, still have price stickers on them.