Just got my three CDs this morning and so far I've listened to ...SOUNDS LIKE... and I've just moved on to BOTB.
I only acquired a vinyl of ...SOUNDS LIKE... a year or two back, and it's always struck me as one of Herb's best albums ( - after WHIPPED CREAM and GOING PLACES that is) so it's cool to hear it cleanly.
No gripes about the transferring here, and "Casino Royale" does indeed sound much crisper than any other CD transfer I've heard to date. Hurrah!
In fact it would be perfect were it not for the washed-out blue on the cover. I'm puzzled that the image on the Shout Factory website (from where I presume Mike took the image at the top of this page) is the blue that I reckon it ought to be, whereas my copy of nearly pink.
Which leads me to the obvious question - if Shout Factory had to scrubble around buying/borrowing (no doubt for money) old (did someone say dirty?) sleeves from MusicManMurray.com, where did they get the cover art from?
I take on board the suggestion that the artwork on the booklet is meant to look "distressed" but I really can't understand why. They haven't put crap hissy mono-from-third-generation-8 track audio on the disc; the front covers don't have deliberate fingerprints or coffee stains, so why should be have to accept the original back sleeves in a sorry state? Heck, I reckon there are at least a dozen of us on here who own crisp white virgin copies of these sleeves and would have been only too happy to lend - heck, GIVE them away in such a good cause.
But back to the front covers. Having designed more than a few CD sleeves and then wept when thousands came back from the printers looking nothing much like the original colours, I know that even in the 21st Century, colour printing is a black art. (Pun intended!) But "Ninth" looks EXACTLY like the original (and I have both US and UK copies of that - the UK of course is beautifully laminated. Never figured why you Americans always accepted matt sleeves that could so easily be spoiled when a penny's worth of laminate makes the sleeve look so good.) and is a perfect colour match.
But the following conversation might shed some light on the situation....
Last week I was talking to Tony Hatch about the box set reissue of his first six albums, each of which is inserted into a cardboard "mini sleeve" that almost matches the originals except the track listing has sides one and two removed and where the Pye logo used to be there are now a plethora of logos. The artwork for his first album looks almost like a colour photocopy, while the rest are crisp and clear. "How did you source the artwork?" I asked. "Scanned the original sleeves" he said. "Why didn't you borrow mine?", I asked. "Ah, well I was on the verge of telling Sanctuary to ask you to lend them your copies" he said " but then I thought - they'll lose them or damage them and you'd be less than happy. So I told them to go and buy copies on GEMM. And that's what they did - so nobody got upset when their precious 12" sleeve got messed up."
Perhaps the same holds true here?
I only acquired a vinyl of ...SOUNDS LIKE... a year or two back, and it's always struck me as one of Herb's best albums ( - after WHIPPED CREAM and GOING PLACES that is) so it's cool to hear it cleanly.
No gripes about the transferring here, and "Casino Royale" does indeed sound much crisper than any other CD transfer I've heard to date. Hurrah!
In fact it would be perfect were it not for the washed-out blue on the cover. I'm puzzled that the image on the Shout Factory website (from where I presume Mike took the image at the top of this page) is the blue that I reckon it ought to be, whereas my copy of nearly pink.
Which leads me to the obvious question - if Shout Factory had to scrubble around buying/borrowing (no doubt for money) old (did someone say dirty?) sleeves from MusicManMurray.com, where did they get the cover art from?
I take on board the suggestion that the artwork on the booklet is meant to look "distressed" but I really can't understand why. They haven't put crap hissy mono-from-third-generation-8 track audio on the disc; the front covers don't have deliberate fingerprints or coffee stains, so why should be have to accept the original back sleeves in a sorry state? Heck, I reckon there are at least a dozen of us on here who own crisp white virgin copies of these sleeves and would have been only too happy to lend - heck, GIVE them away in such a good cause.
But back to the front covers. Having designed more than a few CD sleeves and then wept when thousands came back from the printers looking nothing much like the original colours, I know that even in the 21st Century, colour printing is a black art. (Pun intended!) But "Ninth" looks EXACTLY like the original (and I have both US and UK copies of that - the UK of course is beautifully laminated. Never figured why you Americans always accepted matt sleeves that could so easily be spoiled when a penny's worth of laminate makes the sleeve look so good.) and is a perfect colour match.
But the following conversation might shed some light on the situation....
Last week I was talking to Tony Hatch about the box set reissue of his first six albums, each of which is inserted into a cardboard "mini sleeve" that almost matches the originals except the track listing has sides one and two removed and where the Pye logo used to be there are now a plethora of logos. The artwork for his first album looks almost like a colour photocopy, while the rest are crisp and clear. "How did you source the artwork?" I asked. "Scanned the original sleeves" he said. "Why didn't you borrow mine?", I asked. "Ah, well I was on the verge of telling Sanctuary to ask you to lend them your copies" he said " but then I thought - they'll lose them or damage them and you'd be less than happy. So I told them to go and buy copies on GEMM. And that's what they did - so nobody got upset when their precious 12" sleeve got messed up."
Perhaps the same holds true here?