Pink floyd the early years 1965-1972

[movement]

So these downloads are being sold pointedly as upgrades for the CDs.

I wouldn't make any assumptions as to the target market for sites like hdtracks and acousticsounds. I believe the target market is people who are digital-only and want nothing to do with physical releases. However, I haven't seen any reports to support either point of view.

[sb33334]

It appears that at least Dramatisation is making its rounds at the usual sources such as a green demon so should be easy to find out quickly if these are upgrades/untouched or not.

Monetis/ation

[meneerjansen]

And its been verified that Meddle in 5.1 has been removed from the individual set.

Thanks for that info! The multichannel remixes were one of the few things you play over and over again. The found footage is a must have, but I wouldn't play is weekly, whereas I play the albums regularly.

[Roscoe59]

It appears that at least Dramatisation is making its rounds at the usual sources such as a green demon so should be easy to find out quickly if these are upgrades/untouched or not.

Monetis/ation

What's the current domain for Demonoid these days? Curious to have a look especially since Pirate Bays been down.

[jaman57]

What's the current domain for Demonoid these days? Curious to have a look especially since Pirate Bays been down.

https://www.dnoid.me/

[jimfisheye]

I wouldn't make any assumptions as to the target market for sites like hdtracks and acousticsounds. I believe the target market is people who are digital-only and want nothing to do with physical releases. However, I haven't seen any reports to support either point of view.

People that are either casual listeners or use portable devices download mp3s. The 24 bit downloads/DVDA/blurays are clearly aimed at the audiophile/home theater listener.

The downloads omit literally most of the content from the sets - all the HD content! These aren't the "download version" for the set.
These appear to be intended as upgrades for the reduced content of the box only. The deluxe version for the box content that was presented as the budget edition.

That it's been outed as the very same copy is just really shitty greedy!

I've still got to admit this box has desirable content even for those of us around here with already very complete collections. These bait & switch download editions should be avoided though! It's just really too bad that there are obviously some people involved that are over the top greedy used car salesmen who care absolutely nothing for this music and would go so far as to intentionally damage the audio to bait & switch customers with messed up editions.

It's hard enough work to make a release at high quality and free of any defects. It's hard enough to get people to buy music these days even. This seems like the stupidest way you could possible handle this. The honest mistakes in this set are trivial compared to the intentional dishonesty at play. It's really a bummer to see this material and these releases stained by all this. It should have been a big celebration.

[Roscoe59]

... and would go so far as to intentionally damage the audio to bait & switch customers with messed up editions.

Intentionally damage the audio?

[jimfisheye]

Intentionally damage the audio?

That's a pointed statement yes. Not in any way the kind of review I wanted to be making about any of this! The evidence in front of us speaks for itself unfortunately.

The band has this music a lot of us want to hear. The masters came off their digital workstation in modern 24 bit full dynamic range lossless format (as is the case now in this golden age of HD audio we live in). They took these and mastered them down to portable device quality and only released that. Then they came back with these 24 bit files that turned out to be copies of the portable mastering work. I'm nor sure what the hell else to call crap like that! Obviously there's some seedy marketing type that wants to keep hoarding the unstepped on audio for some future release. The only other explanation is epic clueless screwing up. I mean... did the person in charge of this get hit in the head really hard at some point?

This box set IS cause for celebration but it's stained by crap like this.

It goes without saying too that some of the material they decided to release in degraded form is still just night and day in better shape than we've ever heard it before. This is truly wonderful to have. It's also awesome that what are the lower fidelity "portable" formats now sound as good as they do. The lowest common denominator has really been raised along with the high mark. It just really rubs you the wrong way when someone comes along and says "Hold on, I'm not giving you the master. I'm going to set the quality switch a notch lower and you can only have that. Just because."

Is this kind of stuff going on with video releases too? Do you sometimes buy a bluray edition for your 4k screen and discover it's only a clone of the lower res DVD?

I wonder how this works out in the end too. Do they really get multiple sales this way? People actually coming back months or a year later and buying the 'new and improved' version? It looks for all the world to me that the end result is material never getting released or only getting released in degraded form at the end of the day. It used to be more fun looking for the best vinyl pressing when it was honestly difficult to produce good ones. This is just frustrating now.


The BBC stuff was at least an honest mistake. And genuine kudos to them for at least releasing it even if it was destroyed copies! Of course some of us realized they screwed up and didn't look hard enough. But it was still an honest mistake.


Maybe someone needs to hit me over the head!

It's awesome that the casual fan can download a tiny mp3 and hear the audio on their iThing sounding as full fidelity as that does now. That's truly a great thing.

But here I am with my wallet open looking for the deluxe edition for the home system and it's non stop bait & switch!
And we're talking about the original audiophile and surround sound band here!

[patsdelight]

So now, the $64,000 question (for me, at least) is why the sampler was released at 96k with different/better mastering (less NR, different EQ) and the individual volumes weren't.

Sigh. This is so frustratitng. Pompeii and OBC and the other remixed material especially could've sounded so much better.

Maybe they'll re-release the material in 96k on HDTracks with better mastering later, but I'm not holding my breath...

[Roscoe59]

Jim - with all due respect I continue to have a problem with your posts due to the choice of words you use to describe the mastering process. I wonder how many other people are confused by things like "portable mastering work"? I know that Andy was when I asked him about it. Simply call it for what it is - mastering audio for CD or MP3. Mastering for portable devices is unclear to me and suggests certain MP3 downloads offered by iTunes that are specifically mastered for this medium.

For TEY audio Andy worked from numerous sources - from lossy MP3 (obviously BBC Flaming) to tapes that he transferred himself (96/24). Andy then worked on remastering the audio maintaining the resolution and bit rate. For the release of the box the result of his work was bumped down to 44.1/16 for the CDs. Now the result of his remastering has been bumped down to 44.1/24 for HD tracks (he had nothing to do with this, he didn't even know about it). Sure, it would great to just release all of his work at the same resolution and bit rate of his remasters but that's not what the corporation decided to give us.

Maybe they'll re-release the material in 96k on HDTracks with better mastering later, but I'm not holding my breath...

That would just give Jim more to complain about: yet another bait-and-switch and bumping up lower resolution audio to 96k. I don't see this happening.