The Kinks PRT CD Discography?

The U.S. Reprise Lola sounds exceedingly dull, likely due to a very high gen tape source. I would not particularly recommend it unless you are deathly allergic to treble.

 

I do prefer the PRT CDs of VGPS and Arthur over the Reprise counterparts and over the 1998 remasters. The stereo mix on the 3-CD VGPS is also very good, but it does sound a bit smoother on the PRT CD. I have come to prefer the mono mix of VGPS, however.

For Something Else, my preferred version of the stereo mix consists of the tracks Tin Soldier Man and Situation Vacant from the Reprise CD and everything else from the PRT CD.

 

I guess i will pass on this. What is the best mono Face to Face?

 

You don't have many options. Of the...well, two that are available, the K2 "Face to Face" seems to be taken from a similar source as the 1998 reissue, but is notably lacking the 1998 version's NR. However, bear in mind that some find the EQ profile of the K2 discs to be a bit "aggressive"...I enjoy many of them, but your mileage may vary.

(as an aside, I love the EQ job that Steve did on the version of "Sunny Afternoon" on Changin' Times).

 

By far the best version of Face To Face I have is a needle drop from a mono LP.

 

Intereting about he Teichiku CD's. I see these quite frequently here - sad to hear they are afflicted by NoNoise.

 

The various mono and stereo mixes make for an additional complication here. Kinda Kinks and Kontroversy are mono only. Lola and Percy are stereo only. I like Kinks and Face to Face much better in mono, and Arthur much better in stereo; the other three cases aren't as clear-cut, but I lean towards the mono. Here's what I'm currently going with:

Kinks (mono): 1998 Castle Essential. (No choice.)

Kinks (stereo): PRT, or MFSL You Really Got Me/Kinda Kinks two-fer.

Kinda Kinks (mono): MFSL two-fer, maybe. But the difference is so small that it's hardly worth the additional expense over the PRT or Castle CLACD.

The Kink Kontroversy (mono): PRT or Castle CLACD.

Face to Face (mono): Victor Japan "K2" mini-LP. Slightly bright, but less so than the 1998 Face to Face or for that matter some of the other K2s.

Face to Face (stereo): PRT.

Live at Kelvin Hall (mono): 1998 Castle Essential. (No choice.)

Live at Kelvin Hall (stereo): PRT. Not that it makes much difference.

Something Else (mono): The 1998 Castle Essential is the only mono disc out there. I go with my own version of this, a hodge-podge assembled from several different discs.

Something Else (stereo): Like Andreas, I go with the Reprise CD for the original stereo mixes of "Tin Soldier Man" and "Situation Vacant," and the PRT for all other tracks. (The PRT is not even the best source for both remixes; "Situation Vacant" is missing its coda, although you can find the remix with coda intact on either See for Miles's The EP Collection or Victor Japan's "K2" Something Else.)

The Village Green Preservation Society (mono): Deluxe Edition.

The Village Green Preservation Society (stereo): PRT, but the Deluxe Edition is quite good too. The Deluxe Edition is also the best CD source for the alternate stereo mixes on the LP's export version.

Arthur (mono): 2001 Sanctuary mini-LP, with alternate Dutch cover art. (No choice.)

Arthur (stereo): PRT.

Lola (stereo): 1998 Castle Essential (!)

Percy (stereo): 1998 Castle Essential (!!)

Mono singles and EPs: Greatest Hits (PRT), Hit Singles (PRT, UK edition), The Kinks Are Well Respected Men (PRT), and The Ultimate Collection (Sanctuary) are the most useful compilations.

Dave Davies solo singles: The Album That Never Was (PRT).

 

What he said.

The Reprise CDs sound much more high-gen than they really ought to be; I think Reprise did some additional fiddling with the tapes back in the '60s, including analogue compression. The only Reprise CDs of interest are Something Else (for "Tin Soldier Man" and "Situation Vacant") and Kink Kronikles (for the rarities).

 

All of the PYC series Kinks CDs I've seen suffer from the "Mastered By Nimbus" sticky label syndrome

Does anybody have copies that aren't pressed by Nimbus?

There was also a German reissue of The Kinks Are Well Respected Men on Castle/PRT in about 1992, in a weird slimline double case. I'll post the catalog number when I get home.

The remix of "Tin Soldier Man" has the first notes cut off on the PRT and Castle CLACD releases, but on the 2001 UK Mini-LP it has the full intro

 

I just bought a WG "Hit Singles" for $10 just to hear how bad it really is

I think I might just put my UK PYC 4001 Hit Singles CD in the WG artwork, so I have a matching set (the artwork on my UK Hit Singles is ruined by a big sticker on the front cover )

 

Matthew,thank you for great & detailed info.

 

My PYCs are all Nimbus. Earlier British PRT discs aren't.

I think they were trying to emulate the standard mono mix there, which is missing the same two notes, but they made a hash of it. The tail-end of the second note is still in there. You need the 2001 Sanctuary mini-LP or the Victor Japan "K2" to get a remix with both notes intact.

I don't know whether the coda on the remixed "Situation Vacant" is something that PRT sliced off, or something that other people later added on. The coda on the See for Miles and K2 releases is just a reprise of the song's ending, with no change in the mix; anyone with a mind to could edit up something similar at home. That's different from the original stereo mix, where the false ending and the coda are mixed quite differently.

 

Have you tried lining up the coda with the part it's repeated from? If it was just an edit, it would probably have been done digitally, just a cut and paste job...

I just got the WG PRT of Something Else in the mail, it would be perfect if it had the slightly warmer mastering of the Reprise CD

 

All right. More than anyone needs to know about the stereo mix variations for "Tin Soldier Man" and "Situation Vacant":

I don't know when, where, or why the remixes were done. Doug Hinman probably has something to say about it in You Really Got Me, but I don't have that book. Dave Emlen, who takes most of his information from Hinman, dates them to 1987 at his site. They may go back earlier than that. The stereo remix of "Tin Soldier Man" appeared in 1987 on the Castle CD The Kinks Collection (CCSCD 113); this was a reissue of their 1985 LP set of the same name (CCSLP 113), and though I haven't heard the vinyl version, I'd expect that the same tapes were used. I have no idea if the "Situation Vacant" remix ever surfaced prior to the German PRT/Teldec Something Else CD in 1988.

Emlen summarises the alternate "Tin Soldier Man" as "missing first two notes" and the alternate "Situation Vacant" as "missing reprise"; I've seen similar descriptions elsewhere. This oversimplifies. There are versions of the former with the first two notes intact, and versions of the latter with a full coda.

"Tin Soldier Man" is less complicated, so let's deal with that first. The original stereo mix starts out with the drums all the way to the left. The backing vocals at around 1:20 are mixed centre, and the brass at the end of the song pans from left to centre. On the remix, the drums are centre throughout, the backing vocals at 1:20 are mixed right, and there's no panning effect on the brass.

Oh, and could someone with a copy of the 1967 British stereo LP confirm that the original mix sounds as I've described it, and I'm not misdirecting a lot of effort here? Thanks.

The original stereo mix is on the Reprise Something Else CD. The stereo remix is on the PRT and Castle CLACD Something Else CDs with its first note and a half cut off, possibly in a ham-fisted attempt to imitate the original mono mix. The CLACD also swaps left and right channels. The stereo remix can be found with its full-length opening on Castle's The Kinks Collection CD, and on the mini-LP editions of Something Else from Victor Japan (2000, "K2" series) and Sanctuary (2001).

"Situation Vacant," now. As noted upthread, there are three stereo variations floating around out there on CD: the original stereo mix (with coda), on the Reprise Something Else; a short remix (with no coda), on the PRT, the Castle CLACD, and the Sanctuary 2001 mini-LP Something Else; and a long version of the remix (with coda), on the Victor Japan "K2" Something Else and on See for Miles's The EP Collection. (Don't confuse the See for Miles disc with a later box set from Castle, also titled The EP Collection, which features "Situation Vacant" in its mono mix.)

On the original stereo mix, the organ is mixed left in the song's first half. On the remix it sometimes comes out of both channels at once (at 0:27, for instance). The original mix has ghostly wailing near the end of the song. These vocal overdubs are missing from both edits of the remix.

Again, confirmation from owners of the original LP would be nice.

All three stereo versions fade out to silence at around 2:45. At this point the short edit of the remix just stops. But on the original stereo mix and the longer remix, there's a reprise of the song's final section, starting from the descending piano right after Ray sings the final lyric, "And little mama's satisfied." On the original stereo mix this coda is slightly abridged, with the wailing overdubs mixed higher than before. The song clocks in at about 3:10.

The long remix reprises the entire ending of the song, and then some. This version is about 3:18.

(In the mono mix the false ending comes later, at about 2:55, and the reprise is at low volume and quite short. Total length, about 3:15.)

The short and long edits of the remix are the same up until the point where one ends and the other doesn't. If you open up the short version in an audio editor and segue a duplicate copy of the track's final section, you'll almost have the long edit. The performance and mixing are the same in both the main body and the long edit's reprise; the only differences are in volume and in length. The main body of the remix (in both edits) has a relatively long fade-out. In the remixed coda the fade-out starts later and happens faster, and there's about a second and a half of music at the end beyond what's included in the shorter edit.

I've had a look at the wave forms for the See for Miles and K2 tracks, and tried to line up the coda of each with the corresponding portion of the main body. In both cases, the wave forms looked extremely similar, but they weren't identically shaped, and they didn't line up sample for sample. The similarity was still close enough that a digital edit seems plausible; maybe both masterings were sourced from the same digital tape.

Certainly, neither was sourced from the data on the PRT or Castle CLACD CDs. There's that extra 1.5 seconds to account for. And the K2 couldn't have been sourced from the See for Miles CD. The See for Miles mastering has some very subtle noise reduction in the fades; the K2 doesn't. And the K2 version actually continues for a sliver longer than the See for Miles.

So I'm leaning towards the theory that the coda was included in the original version of the stereo remix. PRT and its successors didn't use it in house, either by accident or design — probably accident; c.f. the "Top of the Pops" intro — but it somehow got sent out to other labels that licensed the song.

 

Matthew, thanks again. Brilliant posts, man, brilliant. Archived on my end.

 

Yaarggh, too late to edit this now. On the original stereo mix of "Situation Vacant," the organ starts off mixed right.

I'm happy they're appreciated. I often worry that this stuff would bore any sane person comatose.

 

Good humor too!

 

I appreciate your insights.

By virtue of our membership here, I'd say the definition of 'sane person' may be open to debate.

 

I am glad you have pointed us to CD's that I know I have no chance of finding up here.

Your posts are extremely informative, Thanks Matthew

 

Not exactly PRT related, but I just got the Mono CD of Arthur (2001 UK Mini-LP) and "Brainwashed" is so much heavier in mono! It's worth buying just for this mix!

 

Besides the UK press having the sides switched. Right in the middle of "House In The Country" theres some bad electical pops and one of the channels goes out for a few seconds, otherwise it's OK. You just have to program your player to play the disc in the correct sequence.

 

That tape fault is on the WG PRT and the 2001 UK Mini-LP too, but the pop has been removed on the Mini-LP.

 

And the vocals are mixed out of phase.
When you hit the mono button on the pre-amp, they disappear.

 

Just checked, the 1989 CLACD has the pop and dropout too.

 

I half-wonder if that drop-out might not just be the result of a really bad edit. It's right before the guitar solo, the only thing in that mix that's actually in stereo.

I think all three stereo CD masterings source back to the same original transfer, so it's hard to make useful comparisons.