Definitive Audiophile pressings

Well here's a real bargain for you audiophiles. Just take a look at those definitive audiophile pressings you can see in the photos. This guy could obviously get way more than asking price. 🫣
 
Well here's a real bargain for you audiophiles. Just take a look at those definitive audiophile pressings you can see in the photos. This guy could obviously get way more than asking price. 🫣
Why go for that when you could buy this instead??

 
I will say, this might strike me like the VMP Sabbath though. Probably not as I don't have years of living with the record to color my opinion of the pressing. Television has only really been on my radar for the last year or so. I had listened to Marquee Moon a few times over the years, but it only really started to click in this last year.
 
Fremer doesn't bash the Television, he says it sounds really good and then bashes some other stuff. He goes into that rant because of the Television record. He just says it is different.
He definitely makes an interesting point about the (presumed) lack of oversight for a lot of remasterings/represses. He mentions how Joe Harley works with Kevin Gray to assure that the Blue Note Tone Poet records sound the way Harley wants them to sound (keeping the originals in mind), and then posits that there are a lot of represses coming out for which that kind of oversight is completely absent. He cites the recent Tom Waits and The Who reissues as prime examples. So he raises the question of whether sounding great is enough (the new Television record sounds great, but he doesn't think it's in keeping with what was originally intended with the recording), but he also rails against other recent reissues that he says are just plain horrible.
 
He definitely makes an interesting point about the (presumed) lack of oversight for a lot of remasterings/represses. He mentions how Joe Harley works with Kevin Gray to assure that the Blue Note Tone Poet records sound the way Harley wants them to sound (keeping the originals in mind), and then posits that there are a lot of represses coming out for which that kind of oversight is completely absent. He cites the recent Tom Waits and The Who reissues as prime examples. So he raises the question of whether sounding great is enough (the new Television record sounds great, but he doesn't think it's in keeping with what was originally intended with the recording), but he also rails against other recent reissues that he says are just plain horrible.

"Personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, Waits spectacular middle-period albums–released on Island Records,"

It's not that the Waits reissues didn't have oversight, it's that a lot of folks don't like what Waits and Brennan have been going for on their remasters.
 
He definitely makes an interesting point about the (presumed) lack of oversight for a lot of remasterings/represses. He mentions how Joe Harley works with Kevin Gray to assure that the Blue Note Tone Poet records sound the way Harley wants them to sound (keeping the originals in mind), and then posits that there are a lot of represses coming out for which that kind of oversight is completely absent. He cites the recent Tom Waits and The Who reissues as prime examples. So he raises the question of whether sounding great is enough (the new Television record sounds great, but he doesn't think it's in keeping with what was originally intended with the recording), but he also rails against other recent reissues that he says are just plain horrible.

"Personally overseen by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, Waits spectacular middle-period albums–released on Island Records,"

It's not that the Waits reissues didn't have oversight, it's that a lot of folks don't like what Waits and Brennan have been going for on their remasters.
There's what @JonnyH says here, but also that Fremer says those others don't sound very good. I have the Who's Next it is pretty compressed, but it ain't a bad pressing. This may be what he is actually railing against. I've only heard the rerecording of Closing Time which isn't a bad pressing, it's just not the album I know, if you know what I mean.

It is an interesting point and JonnyH opens up an old thing I have held. The artists are sometimes behind these remasters we don't think much of, so who are we to say what they wanted and didn't want (I'm specifically thinking of the Stones here. The Bowie stuff to a lesser extant with Visconti behind changes made here and there).

I mean the Shades of Blue BN reissue is a perfect example of where that oversight can be off.

I also know that Gray likes to use the notes, so who knows what they wanted here. Maybe someone did fuck the og master up. I certainly don't know.

I'm more concerned that there is not a lot of thought put into the vinyl mix of things sometimes. This is an oversite issue, but actual more prevalent and also of a different mechanism then what he is talking about. There was oversite by the band and producer of Black Crowes' Southern Harmony and Musical Companion and the digital sounds great, but the vinyl is meh because no one had the insight to go "HEY THIS IS TOO MUCH FOR ONE SLAB."
 
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