Spot on. Why tamper with the pure files!!!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.