Remastered - from bloody vinyl?
I've just got home with my newly-purchased New Order album Tecnique, remastered and repackaged with sleeve notes (not very enlightening) by Ian Harrison, brother of Andrew of this parish.
Now, I'm only 43, but I still can't quite tell if the actual album sounds better or not than the original version or not. Quite frankly I'm not sure that it does. Perhaps if I had an even more expensive sound system or iPod it might do?
Anyway, CD1 is debatable. But CD2 there's the unmistaken sound of snap, crackle and pop! Yes, CD2 appears to have been remastered solely by sticking on a bit of rare New Order vinyl and then twiddling some knobs to get it into an mp3 format!
Vinyl remastering. Quite frankly, quite literally, anyone of us could do it. So I'm feeling pretty damn cheated. Discuss. Thx.
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did you buy it on cd?
or Mp3 if so it will sound shoddy, as to the liner notes New Orders have never been expansive (if they existed at all!)
I've not heard the tracks but Hooky on the radio with Stuart Marconi did indicate they had problems tracking down master tapes (the chaos of Factory meant nobody looked after them and some are missing) so they may well have dubbed them from vinyl
You're not alone...
...these remasters have been getting a kicking on a few forums. I had a look at that New Order forum and there were several thread expressing displeasure with their quality. This is not the first time 'remasters' have ended up worse than the original copies!
I was thinking about giving them a go
but may just havea go with at the Retro boxset. Anyone have a view if that would be a better bet?
Lack of attention to detail
This seems to me to be a shoddy attitude.
In this digital age it is a fairly simple process to remove pops and crackles without interfering with the integrity of the sound. A little bit of time at no great expense could have resolved this problem.
lack of attention to detail
There's something very New Order / Factory about that though isn't there?
Too right
Some of the bonus tracks have been incorrectly labelled, eg True Faith (True Dub) is actually the Tall Paul Eschreamer remix; Beach Buggy is actually Blue Monday '88 Dub; the version of MTO is the longer Minus Mix etc. etc. (If you're interested there's a discussion thread setting out all the issues with the remasters here on New Order Online.)
But what else did you expect? This is the band who put out two different versions of Ceremony without explaining that's what they'd done. They're the band that mis-labelled Cries and Whispers as Mesh, and vice versa, for years. (I've not checked whether they're correctly labelled on the Movement reissue, but I know where my money would go if I were a betting man.) They released wildly different versions of Substance across the three formats that were available at the time and then did the same thing with the Rest Of remixes compilation.
To expect them to pay any attention to detail at this stage of their career is more than a little hopeful...
I must say...
...watching that BBC4 documentary on Factory recently, a lot of it came off as a real comedy of errors. The fiasco with the cost of the 'Blue Monday' sleeve and the diabolical live TOTP performance which made their record go down instead of up are just two examples!
After paying for the packaging...
They didn't have any funds left to remaster it properly, so just sat Hooky down with a handheld C90 recorder and a dansette.
no I think
Stephen's Nan videoed them on the chart show and Hooky held a mike up to his telly to get into onto a c120! I must admit to not having heard any of the the discs, but seeing as most of their fans are middle aged blokes like me with crap hearing (both by virtue of our gender and listening to music too loud for 20 years) can people hear these defects particularly when played on an Ipod with 99p ear buds bouncing along on the victoria line!
Packaging angst
I only really like six or seven New Order songs (that I know about) so am not planning on buying these. But I had a look at them out of curiosity to see what albums the tracks I liked belonged to and whether there were remixes/12" versions of them as bonus tracks etc etc.
(And they are rather nice so no hardship picking them up for a fondle.)
But I'm not going mad, am I? - there are no bloody track details visible anywhere on the outside. All very 'Factory', I'm sure, but I just thought 'bugger this' and put them back.
Yes, ok, I could look up the tracks on-line. Yawn. I could have been seduced by the beauty of the things 'live' in the shop if I also knew they contained riches.
Perhaps they would say something like, 'This is an important element of our minimalist aesthetic.' Perhaps I would say, 'Idiots.'
They are very shoddy
Blue Monday STILL has the first beat missing, many of the tracks are labelled wrongly and mastered from vinyl. One track, State of The Nation, appears on Brotherhood AND Lowlife and some of the most sought after rarities are missing completely. The mastering on the studio albums is apalling. They have just been brick-walled i.e. made as loud as possible and thus losing the subtlety of the songs. This was also a problem with the Cocteau Twins reissues. The original 4AD cds are of considerably better sound quality.
I have reached the conclusion that this whole remastering malarky is just a scam and an attempt to get the fans to double dip. No wonder people just go onto www.illegaldownloadsarefunhonest.com and download it for free.
LINK NOT SAFE FOR WORK!
Apologies for shouting but you'll thank me for it later.
Ewww
Good spot. I have edited Futurenoir's post to point at a site that doesn't actually exist.
It's not just me then!
Technique was my favourite NO album (that's my personal taste of course, it not actually be their best) so I thought the remaster would be out of this world.
Of course, as described above, this is not the case really. Further to the snaps, pops and crackles, I now think that one of the best songs on the album, Vanishing Point, has somehow been slowed down considerably! Either that or the original was mastered too fast!
I know Factory was notoriously (and admirably, in my opinion) disorganised and shambolic, which is almost to their credit. But these remasters are coming from bloody Rhino/Warner Brothers for god's sake!
Some of us are just trying to relive the great music of our youth, and all Warner Bloody Brothers can do is make it sound like it was a totally shit time...
Hooky's take on this
A quick update because Hooky's had something to say to BBC 6 Music on this whole farrago.
Hook attributed [the poor sound quality] to problems within the record company, saying: “They don’t have half the staff they used to have so everything becomes quite a trial... they are mastered from the record because nobody can find the tape.”
And it seems there was some miscommunication with their record label: “What’s been intensely annoying for us is that all these people are complaining because they’ve bought them in the shops and Warner’s chose to release them to the shops before they sent them to the band, so I haven’t got one. A masterful piece of planning.”
There's also an email given for anyone wishing to complain to Warner about the reissues: Neworder.d2c@warnermusic.com
The original article is here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/news/20081010_hook.shtml
Cheers