Laugh a bit about 5 dreadfully recorded CD's - any genre!

Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power - Initially produced by Iggy himself and then totally destroyed by David Bowie.Tragic.

The Velvet Underground - Loaded - Fantastic set of songs completely ruined by an over complicated mix and poor production. Lou Reed hates this album because of what "They" did to his songs.

Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street - The original "Sounds like it was recorded in somebodies toilet" album. Masochistic listening.

Derek and the Dominoes - Layla - I have tried to like this album and have heard it in many different guises but it always sounds completely DUFF. The most overrated album of all time?
BTW I would also include ALL of Claptons recent Simon (Climie) Fishers collaborations here too. Awful, just awful productions.

Lastly

Steely Dan - Katy Lied - The perils of utilising a DBX noise reduction system on the original master almost rendered this album unreleaseable. I bought the Citizen CD Box Set when it came out after I read Denny Dias stating that this would be as good as Katy would ever get. It didn't! As Walter Becker said at the time "Machines 10 - Humans NIL!"

Peter

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Iggy and the Stooges - Raw Power - Initially produced by Iggy himself and then totally destroyed by David Bowie.Tragic.

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I've had a chance to hear one of the first U.S pressings of this record (original mix) and it is stunning how different it sounds--more reverb/ambience, less distortion--sounds like an actual band. Don't know how to tell the two apart physically, but will find out...

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The Velvet Underground - Loaded - Fantastic set of songs completely ruined by an over complicated mix and poor production. Lou Reed hates this album because of what "They" did to his songs.

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But the CD remaster sounds quite good, especially the bonus tracks--Lou Reed needs as much help as he can get, anyway. John Cale, on the other hand, is a much more consumnate musician...

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Kate Bush : Wuthering Heights or whatever the name of the CD may be. Just hurts your ears and suffers from utter distortion.

Any CD by Asia. They forgot the bass and the upper range is totally overblown.

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Yet these records are fine on vinyl, so it must be the mastering process, not the recording per se.

Keep in mind that the CD masters were done ages ago at a time when people didn't know better (though I thought there were supposed to be a complete set of Asia re-masters, as well as some Wetton solo stuff kicking around). No comment about the musical content, but the recording sounds okay on a system that can resolve the ambient miking.

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Derek and the Dominoes - Layla - I have tried to like this album and have heard it in many different guises but it always sounds completely DUFF. The most overrated album of all time?

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Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street - The original "Sounds like it was recorded in somebodies toilet" album. Masochistic listening.

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I haven't heard it on CD but The Kick Inside (on which Wuthering Heights appears) seems to me to be among the best produced pop records.

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Cheese - may all beings be happy

Don't feel sorry for these guys. The ammount of stimuli consumed in the making and subsequent mastering I'm sure would more than have made up for their disappointment on the resulting sound of their "Babies" upon release. That is, if they were ever in a fit enough state to ever notice

Hey Dave

You talking about the original Raw Power before Tony Defries decided to give it to Bowie to rework at Western Sound in LA?

I thought that the original Iggy mix recorded at CBS in London had been binned?

I still love that album though, as much as I love Loaded,Exile and Katy Lied too. Regardless.

P.

W

Some more candidates:

Greg Kihn Next of Kihn
His first two albums were rather well recorded, and his fourth lkewise, very clean sound with the right snap. But this album, although IMHO his best ever musically, is terrible sonically - heavily compressed and no top end at all. I would love to see what a remastering could do. This is true for both the LP and the CD.

Any Toni Childs album
I love this woman's voice, but I prefer to listen to her albums in the car...

Sarah MacLachlan Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
I don't expect too many forum members to like this album anyway, but several good songs suffer from what one reviewer called "treacly production". She partially rights these wrongs by an haunting, acoustic version of "Possession" 5:44 into the last track. I notice that her "Freedom Sessions" album has most of the songs redone her way, although she goes out of her way to state in that album that she wouldn't change "Fumbling..." for anything. Right.

Many Parliament Funkadelic's albums
Great funk recorded with tweaky highs and no low end. Funk with no slam - go figure.

I'm sure that there's plenty more!

Side note - I think it was Aerosmith that was produced for cars. The mixing was done with producer sitting in a Pontiac Firebird with the recording piped in from the studio. Brilliant.

Cheers

Keith.

1. Born in The USA by Broooce, a definite ear-ripper
2. (What's the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis: compressed, overblown, shouty; works ok taped on a car radio, which maybe was what they wanted
3. Dunno if it's my copy, but the concert at the Champs Elysees by Michel Petrucciani has digital saturations on most peaks, really nice music rendered unlistenable
4. The Kleiber Brahms Fourth Symphony on DGG: while being one of my favourite performances of the work, seems to have been recorded in an anechoic chamber, with heroic efforts to tame all of the instruments harmonics, at least on my first issue CD - someone told me that the reissue is somewhat better, but I don't know how this could be.
5. Karajan's Tristan on EMI, another first CD issue; if you add the usual Karajan confusion on how an orchestra should sound on disc, the fact that you can trace all of the changes in acoustic and microphone placement, and an early digital remastering, you get an idea of the mess.

Many more will come to my mind, I guess.

Igor

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Sarah MacLachlan Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, I don't expect too many forum members to like this album anyway, but several good songs suffer from what one reviewer called "treacly production"

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This forum member really likes the album. I wouldn't put its main fault as treacly production though, but if someone were to suggest some banal arranging using drum machines that is ripe for extermination I wouldn't argue... I'm with you thinking the "bonus" track at the end is the highlight of the whole set, btw.

Igor:

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2. (What's the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis: compressed, overblown, shouty; works ok taped on a car radio, which maybe was what they wanted

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It's certainly what they got... This is, I think, the worst recording in my collection and renders a set of actually very good pop/rock songs virtually unlistenable when heard in naim-o-scope. Most bad recordings let something through, but in that case obviously enough money and time was spent to crush any spontaneity, joie de vivre, energy etc. that might otherwise have saved it.

Pete.

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(What's the Story) Morning Glory by Oasis: compressed, overblown, shouty; works ok taped on a car radio, which maybe was what they wanted

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I fear that this is the way that most of pop, even the good stuff, is going: being compressed and having the highs cut off just so that it can be listened to in the car, over the radio, and through MP3, without a loss in "quality".

And radio is getting worse. Thanks to some 5-year old legislation, media conglomerates can own just about as many stations as they want, causing community-based stations throughout the states to be bought out and changed to outlets for satellite MP3 feeds.

Keith.

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Sarah MacLachlan Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, I don't expect too many forum members to like this album anyway, but several good songs suffer from what one reviewer called "treacly production"
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This forum member really likes the album. I wouldn't put its main fault as treacly production though, but if someone were to suggest some banal arranging using drum machines that is ripe for extermination I wouldn't argue... I'm with you thinking the "bonus" track at the end is the highlight of the whole set, btw.

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Then I can't recommend "The Freedom Sessions" enough - check it out. It has a wonderful "fat" live sound, and it's version of "Ice" is particularly goosebump-inducing (best played loud).

Cheers

Keith.

My 2 offerings

Prince, 1999 (or Purple Rain for that matter)
The Upsetters, Super Ape

Both have great music though!

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Most of those Cds mentioned so far sound acceptable (if not stunning) when you play them on a really good system.

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The opposite is my feeling with the ones I posted. While you can argue that you can get some of the soul back listening to them through a stellar system, certainly the goofs - intentional or not - of the recording team become more obvious, and more annoying.

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Prince, 1999 (or Purple Rain for that matter)

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Forgot about those. A Linn/Naim dealer once told me that, on vinyl, they weren't that bad. Certainly, on CD, they sound like someone, who was hearing impaired above 3kHz and didn't know it, did the sound balancing. Parade and Lovesexy aren't that good, either, while an US copy of SOTT I got as a cut-out in 1989 (my second one) is quite good.

Igor

[This message was edited by Igor Zamberlan on WEDNESDAY 13 June 2001 at 12:20.]

My CD copy of Prince's 1999 is really good, and it's an oldie.

Pink Floyd's 'Final Cut' on CD in the 80's was disasterous - unless you got a US version (which I went to the trouble of procuring, back then). Story has it that it was EQ'd for CD, then sent to that S-company in Japan... who promptly re-eq'd for CD and then pressed, and distributed the re-eq'd material throughout the rest of the planet.

Interesting how Cheese's parallel thread grows so quickly - all the hifi heads here (as most of us are, I guess) quick to recommend good sounding albums.

For truely dire CD mastering, I still maintain Heaven 17 - The Luxury Gap as it was on CD (bought mine in '86 IIRC) was truely awful - a nails-on-blackboard sterile CD if ever there was one. And that's not taking into account any bias re 80's music!

Hmmm, bad recordings. I'll scratch my head about this one, and see what falls out of the memory banks.

P - you may be interested to know that my old vinyl copy (US or UK, I can't remember) of Katy Lied sounds pretty good to me.

Rico - all your base are belong to us.

Er more crap CDs er.....London Calling by the Clash. The both the original CD and remaster are completely balless compared to the LP (which is admittedly the Buster Gonad of LPs) in my opionion.

SuperApe - my CD sounds like it was taken of a dodgy master - riotous good music and bass that can shatter buildings if need be. I'm jealous of your vinyl Marcus as it one hell of an album.

Rico - all your base are belong to us.

Andrew

Andrew Randle
2B || !2B;
4 ^ = ?;

As an added annoyance, I spied the LP the other day, a month after already buying the CD!

PS: Last weekend i`ve been in Montreux
Marcus Miller and Herbie Hancock played...
Ooooooohh

regards, Wolfgang