I have a similar experience with two stores, one of them was putting an unpacked cd on the shelf. I got that and asked if they had more longboxes, which I got for free (empty). Another store was a cd rental store that was unpacking Ryko longboxes. Managed to get some from them, plus two WG RCA cds which they were replacing. My longboxes are Diamond Dogs, Aladdin Sane, Station To Station (3x), "Heroes", Stage, Lodger and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). The latter still sealed with cd.
Bowie definitely didn’t think about the Doors when covering that song, but rather the 1927 original by Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weil. And by the way, there’s nothing overrated about the Doors.
I think I have said this somewhere before. The only Bowie cds I own are the Rykodiscs releases of David Bowie/The Man Who Sold the World/Hunky Dory/Ziggy Stardust/Aladdin Sane. I bought them used in the late 1990s. What's odd is The Man Who Sold The World cd booklet was at some point balled up and then flattened back out. I've always wondered if someone got freaked out by the Bowie in a dress photo. And then changed their mind.
That PDF is great, but it misses a few things (the JPN for US Space Oddity is slightly weighted toward the right channel) and gets a few things wrong ("Oh! You Pretty Things" is not veiled on the WG Hunky Dory, in fact it's the best version of the song IMO).
this can be said of numerous releases. this album in particular has several tracks with an intentional bias to one channel, as is evident in the waveform of the WG too. the intro of the PDF states "What follows is an album-by-album breakdown of the RCA CDs, using waveforms to literally illustrate the sonic differences between pressings", so this kind of information can be gleaned by the reader. you're looking at an older version, i removed that line years ago after reassessing. again, from the intro, "I’ve tried to keep these comments free of personal bias and any ‘preferred’ ratings are to be taken based on your own tastes as much as mine."
I downloaded this version about a year ago, but it's likely the link I followed was/is to an outdated version. Perhaps it's just my screen but I didn't think the waveforms looked noticeably different, and usually there were comments on this sort of thing. On the Space Oddity blind test thread, you did mention it, but curiously nobody else picked up on it. Apart from Low (which is just mangled), the US Space Oddity is the only one where I really noticed a "channel bias" which didn't match the other versions I compared (WG, 1999, and 2015). If there are other discs like that, I didn't notice (though I haven't done A/B comparisons with every disc yet). Interestingly there is a huge skew to the left channel on the track "Space Oddity" on the WG CD of that album (more than the mentioned US CD skew), but it's only for that one song. The only good source for that track with no issues is the GEMA ChangesOneBowie (or the WG Fame And Fashion, but I don't like the EQ on that track there). What can certainly be gleaned from the waveforms in your PDF is that there's some analog proto-brickwalling on "Changes" for the WG Hunky Dory and ChangesOneBowie CDs. I wonder what happened to that tape? The mastering is almost identical between those two CDs - they don't cancel out perfectly in a null test, but the result is barely audible. Probably the same digital transfer but with a tiny bit of EQ difference, not even enough to affect the RMS, but there. The WG Fame And Fashion "Changes" sounds fine. Anyway, even if I missed some things, thanks so much for your PDF - going through and listening to the RCAs is giving me the same feeling I did when I first got into Bowie and started collecting his stuff a few years back! Of course, this time, he's not going to die in the middle of my collecting binge, so maybe I won't feel so bad in a few months.
2020 and the RCA disc are still a thing. Sad really. Wish AF could get Space to Scary and just call it a day. Knock the suckers out like Tyson.
Yeah - one would think it wouldn't be too hard to better the RCAs. Occasionally shoddy transfers of multi-generational tapes, mastered with so many errors that a 30-page PDF needed to be made detailing everything... Doing better than that is simple! How could you possibly screw it up? How, in 1990? How, in 1999? How, between 2012 and 2017? How!? (I actually still like the 1999 discs, myself - although I acknowledge that they aren't good and they are certainly the least natural sounding of all the discs. Those were the discs I first heard Bowie on and they'll always have a place in my heart. Just maybe not in my disc drive anymore.) I've only heard one track off a Ryko CD ("Suffragette City"), but I thought it sounded really unnatural. Even more than the 1999 masters. There was something in the upper mids that was WAY off. I'm not the best at determining EQ by ear but I'd describe it as "under the acoustic, above the drums" which would probably be the 3 kHz to 9 kHz range (I think). Sounded like a MASSIVE boost. I'm not sure if the Rykos are really lacking bass, or if that goosed range is just completely drowning it out. It's possible that it's only on that one song, but I doubt it.
I think many people started out listening to Bowie thanks to these Ryko releases. I purchased a used "Diamond Dogs" on RCA at a flea market but "Ziggy Stardust" then was a Ryko (on cassette). I was only 11 These bonus tracks are completely part of the original experience for me...
Discounting sound quality, the Rykos are absolutely the best. I loved reading Jeff Rougvie's blog about the origin and creation of the Sound + Vision set. I can't remember if he ever got into the later reissues or if it stopped there. Ryko hit it out of the park, content and packaging-wise. I believe Bowie shot down the request to have liner notes for each album, but apart from that, they used the best tapes they had (even though it accidentally resulted in alternate mixes of a few songs on Young Americans), they added as many bonus tracks as they could get their hands on, they had the awesome long-boxes... they really went all-out with everything. The only drawback is the sound quality, which isn't awful based on the one I've sampled, but it's far from great. (I have heard other Ryko CDs and they do definitely share a sonic signature.) Somebody commented that the Rykos were "remastered to sound different", which is probably the best way to describe it.
It was 1990...CD and digital were still supposed to "sound different"I guess. The Ziggy Stardust promo kit even stated it's the album the way it should have always sounded (even if it's a classic publicity stunt to write something like that). I think there was an idea to make them sound different, very clean etc.
All things considered, I think the Rykos are actually the best single series of Bowie CDs that exist. The 1999 remasters are almost universally loathed. My own attachment to the series doesn't change the fact that they don't sound very good. The Parlophones are ridiculously inconsistent, almost as if every single title was handled by a different crew. Some are okay (TMWSTW, Pinups, Diamond Dogs, maybe Hunky Dory), some are compressed messes (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Berlin trilogy). Some are muddy garbage (Young Americans, the Berlin trilogy again). And Space Oddity is absolutely destroyed by tape damage and digital edits and glitches ("It was God land!") and whatever the hell happens at 1:25 on "Cygnet Committee". The RCAs have the best EQ and dynamics, but every single disc has one issue or another. There's the WG CDs, which are mostly problem-free, but they're very bass-centric in their EQ, and they fade to silence much quicker than other discs, resulting in slightly less music. The JPN for US discs generally have more detailed EQ, but about half of them have glitches of some kind - a hacked-off intro here, a chewed-up tape there. The four JPN for JPN discs are, IMO, not worth bothering with; Karmaman is a fan, but two of them are just louder versions of the same mastering on the US CDs, and the other two have clipped peaks. (For those two, I personally prefer the US CDs' EQ, anyway.) Then there's also three titles which aren't WG, but actually JPN for Europe - they sit somewhere between the WG and US EQ-wise. Then there's also little differences to consider like the between-song bits and bobs on Aladdin Sane or the producer babble at the end of "Width Of A Circle", also different between the two. And then there's Low, which was totally mangled on both discs. Pick your poison - a dead right channel, or missing song intros. All that from EQ'd, mastered-for-LP-cutting copy tapes. Oof. The Rykos, by contrast to all of that, are consistent (beating the Parlophones), not overly processed (beating the Virgins), and, as far as I'm aware, error-free (beating the RCAs). The only major drawback I can think of is that a few Young Americans tracks use slightly different mixes. The EQ on the Rykos is not very good when compared to the RCAs or some of the Parlophones. But, as far as I can tell (other people would know better), there's not much noise reduction used - if any at all - and the EQ can be tweaked to your liking. I spent probably way too much time taking the Ryko track and getting it to match the EQ of the RCA one, and they came out sounding virtually identical. (I wanted to use the Ryko to patch the "Suffragette City" drop-out on the RCA, in case you're wondering why I bothered to go through all that effort.) So, if you've got the whole Ryko series, you won't need to buy multiple discs to get all the songs without errors. You've already got all the bonus tracks, and you can use EQ to get the sound to your liking. Here's an old post with a pretty good EQ recommendation: I've only tested on "Suffragette City", but I would definitely scoop out a lot of the 2k to 8k range: bring 2k down by 1, 3k down by 2, 5k down by 3, and 8k down by 4 - along with the rest of these recommendations. That's my preference, for this one song at least. But the rest is good advice. Wow. I did not mean to spend this much time on this post. I think I'm a bit obsessed. All that said... I'm still sticking with the RCAs, personally. There's just something about 'em that I really like.
2017 was the last modfication but there are probably old links on the forum... this topic has been discussed forever and that pdf gets tossed in at some point. those are the kinds of threads for the in-depth comparisons but ultimately everyone has their favorites and no amount of analysis will change that. the pdf was done to point out differences between the RCA editions, not to compare them to other editions. it was motivated by people using "RCA" as a catch-all unaware that there were two and sometimes three different masters for each title (with noted exceptions). it's presumably some analogue compression. we still don't know what tapes were used by the european engineers. there are vinyl editions with similar characteristics (e.g. the Japanese Hunky Dory) and it may even have been mastered that way for radio-friendly punch. doesn't need an audiophile label, just needs an engineer who can do right by the tapes and not insist on putting his stamp on them. until then the best of the RCAs continue to offer Bowie fans the best digital option for those titles.
I wonder if this will see the light of day again if there’s a box covering 1975...? He sounds, shall we say, strained on it.
to be clear i've only stated a preference for the EQ of the R32P Young Americans, and until revisiting recently i thought the Ziggy offered a modest improvement, but no, i wouldn't call myself a fan outside of the collectibility factor.
Thanks for these responses. My comments about Space Oddity were the only thing I considered to be a noteworthy issue that was omitted from your PDF. I found it unwittingly while trying to decide which compilation sounded the best for "Space Oddity" (genuine shock: the JPN ChangesOneBowie had the most natural EQ - shame about the ending). It seemed strange that you omitted it from the PDF, but it's pretty subtle - maybe it wasn't a big deal to you. I think it's only a big deal to me because I never saw anybody mention it apart from your aside comment in the blind test. Ziggy is an instance where a great digital version simply doesn't exist, and Young Americans is a pick your poison case. A missing intro, slightly early fades, or clipped/limited peaks. I personally like the US Young Americans the best, despite the missing intro. There's a noticeable dip in the midrange, but I actually think it suits the music. The WG is a good alternative if you don't want to mess around with fixing the intro. I found the R32P much too forward-sounding, even when level-matched; the EQ and shaved peaks are a deal-breaker for me. I might still get it to patch the US disc's intro, though, it sounds the closest of all the options. The Young Americans tracks on the compilations sound horrible!
it was probably more evident when compared to other releases. when doing the RCA vs RCA comparisons i listened to each in its entirety, made notes and then went back and forth to compare elements that stood out as different. presumably which one was biased didn't occur to me then. anyhow, i've waffled on about the RCAs on a Ryko thread, so will leave you all to it.
I checked out the Ryko "Heroes" this morning, at the library, while it still plays...Playing it right now. I realized that it was one of the Rykos they have left that I had not ripped yet.
