SRO final price on eBay

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Harry said:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=891960892

I see that our Stefan Daystrom has become the proud owner of an SRO CD from Japan. Wow, what a price!

Holy S*@#! $425??? That's about the highest I've ever seen for a TJB CD (I think a video went for $500). I would've been happy to dub a copy for half of that! :D


Capt. Bacardi
...always helpful online...:cool:
 
The bad part is, that's one of the worst sounding CDs I've ever heard! :sad:

-= N =-
 
I take it you've never heard Columbia's '80s CD reissues of Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy and Miles Ahead...

- William
 
Hmmm...let me guess: the Columbia Jazz Masterpieces series? Yep, got some of those. And to be honest, those sad examples of CDs still do sound better than SRO, which is full of tape noise, occasional dropouts, distortion (on the first minute of "Our Day Will Come", and overmodulation distortion on the bass throughout the entire recording), and lacking any real bass or high end. It is similar to the original A&M CDs in the 80's (using any old LP master A&M could find), but much worse. Sonically it's worthy of being a drink coaster. The Brass Are Comin' on CD sounds much better.

MCA also had some horrible CDs in the 80's. The Who's Who's Next shows a night and day difference between its original CD version and the remastered versions that came out in the late 90's! Ditto the Steely Dan catalog...in fact, some readers of the now-defunct Digital Audio magazine rated Countdown To Ecstasy as one of the all-time worst sounding CDs.

Just shows you how far we've come. :)

-= N =-
 
Yep. Whatever you do, DO NOT listen to SRO with headphones on. You'll swear there's something wrong with your equipment. Just playing it casually in the car, it doesn't sound much worse than any of the other TJB discs. For years, I must've assumed it was OK, and when I finally listened with headphones, I was shocked at how shoddily it was mastered.

It's probably just as bad on the old LP too, but with all of the extra vinyl noise, the listener is further distracted. It's clear that the Japanese simply threw the old LP master onto a CD back when this one was made.

Harry
NP: radio at work
 
The only thing worse than the CD or vinyl is the reel-to-reel version. Sounds just as bad, but as with all reel tapes, hiss is an added problem, not to mention lacking even MORE high-end!!

If by some miracle the original two-track masters are located and used in future releases, SRO should sound much better. But I'm not hopeful, seeing how bad "Tijuana Taxi" sounds from allegedly "original master tapes" on Deaf Hits.

-= N =-
...adding another reason I don't care for SRO...
 
Rudy said:
Hmmm...let me guess: the Columbia Jazz Masterpieces series? Yep, got some of those. And to be honest, those sad examples of CDs still do sound better than SRO, which is full of tape noise, occasional dropouts, distortion ..., and lacking any real bass or high end.
Well... the two CD's I mentioned have all of those problems and more. The reissue producers had a lot of trouble locating the real original masters, and accidentally ended up using a mix of third- or fourth-generation master takes and alternate takes (!), which were then pasted together haphazardly. So in addition to lots of tape hiss and drop-outs, complete lack of bass, etc... there are also very obvious jumps where tapes were spliced together, plus actual musical differences due to the alt takes they used.

Fortunately, they've both been remastered by Legacy in the last five years or so, and sound fine. But those old CD's are serious contenders for the "worst ever" award in my book!

- William
 
Captain Bacardi said:
Holy S*@#! $425??? That's about the highest I've ever seen for a TJB CD (I think a video went for $500). I would've been happy to dub a copy for half of that! :D

Several points about the price:

First, it's not the most a TJB CD has gone for, tho it may the most on eBay. One of the two (I forget which offhand) has gone for over $450 at one of the stores on GEMM (I know because I saw it on GEMM, tried to "Buy" "Bid" whatever, and was told it had already sold for that much!).

Second, I got a "deal" on the other one! :) On Apr 17, TBAC sold for $405 on eBay. Then on Jun 23 it sold for $304. (How much would I have paid if I'd tried to outbid those people? I betcha more than $425!) But on Jul 15 I won it with very mild opposition for only $103.50!!! That's HUNDREDS LESS than the price I've ever seen it go for in the past year (I think another eBay sale many months ago was in the many hundreds, as was another GEMM-listed store's auction).

And I wanted to get all the artwork and everything, just as A&M had released it.
 
OK...for two quarters, I would have copied both for you. :wink:

Oh, and throw in a few cents for jewel case and photo-quality-reproduced inserts.... :wink:

I just get the feeling that, after everyone here has a copy, Herb will suddenly release the entire catalog. That always seems to happen after it's taken me months (or years) to find an out-of-print CD or album. :confused:

-= N =-
...Pirates R Us...
 
Rudy said:
The bad part is, that's one of the worst sounding CDs I've ever heard! :sad:

Be careful what you wish for, it may come true! :)

I am very happy with the bad sound quality, if improved sound quality sounds like what I've heard on another recent CD I bought (for a very reasonable price for an obscure import) on eBay:

A month or two before I got the SRO CD, I got "Burt Bacharach & Hal David: A&M Composers Series, Vol 1". It's mostly other artists than Bacharach, but all from the A&M label. (There are several of these kinds of CDs that have come out in Japan that are overlapping Bacharach compilations with all A&M artists; this one has TJB's "Don't Go Breaking My Heart", another has TJB"s "Promises Promises", and another has some at least one BMB track that hasn't appeared on any other CD that I'm aware of).

Anyway, since my turntable has been out of commission for a while (deadly hum obliterating everything else on one channel, which had been milder and temporarily curable for years but now seems to be permanent), I haven't listened to SRO on LP for a while. When I heard "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" on the Burt compilation, I thought it sounded very clean, but that I didn't like it all that much, and I seemed to remember liking most everything on SRO!

Well, then I got SRO. And dirty sound and all, I love "Don't Go Breaking My Heart" on there!

I've gone back and forth between them a few times trying to figure out what the difference is. Yes, the newer Burt comp has a lot cleaner sound, but is it supposed to? It certainly feels like it has the "kick" and "life" kinda sucked out of it. But it's hard to be sure if it's because it was never meant to sound clean, or because they used clean but 42nd-generation tapes for it (and thus traded one problem for another).

Anyhow, I've forever (like since it was one of the first TJB albums I got in the 60s) thought it SRO as their "garage rock" LP (like SOUNDS LIKE was their "jazz" LP and WARM was their "Braizilian" LP and TBAC was in part their "country" LP [g], etc).

And I do know that in the 60s on some rock albums the sound was INTENTIONALLY "dirtied" up in LP mastering, because they didn't WANT too clean a sound.

Which leads me to wonder whether the same thing was the case for SRO???

And on one specific: The "distortion" on "Our Day Will Come" is not on the first minute, it's on the first verse. But it's so specific it sounds like it's some instrument that's there on the first verse but not on the second one. Perhaps a dirty snare? I do notice on some other tracks later on there's a dirtier snare than they used on other albums, and it has a very similar sound to that "distortion". (And I've heard the same problem on a few other CDs by other artists, where the CD's full separation reveals a problem pairing of instruments in a channel where the partial blending of the LP sorta hid the problem, and that's presumably why they kept it rather than rerecording or remixing when they first were putting out the LP.)

And I haven't noticed any dropouts nearly of the magnitude as on DEF HITS! :)

Meanwhile, I have heard TONS of CDs that sound much worse, because they had ghastly "pumping" side effects of bad noise reduction. I'd rather have all the hiss and some extra than have the treble all disappear every other second because someone didn't know how to adjust their NR device (or used the wrong NR device). At least the Columbia CDs that had this problem in the 80s and early 90s are getting reissued, but the only ever CD pressing of the first FOOLS GOLD album (which I blew import price $$ on) has that problem and you wonder if anyone will ever reissue that properly...
 
Rudy said:
OK...for two quarters, I would have copied both for you. :wink:

Oh, and throw in a few cents for jewel case and photo-quality-reproduced inserts.... :wink:

But how can I ask you that when I'm 7 (?) months behind on sending you those CI white labels I promised? [red face]

Rudy said:
I just get the feeling that, after everyone here has a copy, Herb will suddenly release the entire catalog. That always seems to happen after it's taken me months (or years) to find an out-of-print CD or album. :confused:

I bought plenty of CDs at local used CD stores in the early/mid 90s that either had gone or were about to go out of print (including a Jap FANDANGO that had just gone out of print then) and so far very few of them have been reissued.

So while it may happen, it's FAR from something one can depend on IMHO...

Meanwhile, there is one thing I think I can depend on, after hearing DEF HITS: Any reissues Herb may do in the future will sound VERY different than the previous issues. (Will any new issues of the whole LONELY BULL album be in all mono? Will every reissue have a sticker that says "many bonus dropouts included"?) And so for completists [g], one will not be a substitute for the other.
Hey, even as I was getting the domestic TJB CDs about a decade ago, I noticed that for the albums for which I had good pressings, some of the tracks sounded a little better on CD while other tracks from the same album sounded a little better on LP! (It may have had to do with inner vs outer tracks on a side?) It wasn't so radical and thus I didn't keep those LPs. But I've run into the same thing with two CD issues: Phil Spector's Christmas album was issued once by Chrysalis and then as part of the BACK TO MONO box set, and to my ears some tracks sound better on one version and other tracks sound better on the other version!
 
stefandaystrom said:
Anyway, since my turntable has been out of commission for a while (deadly hum obliterating everything else on one channel, which had been milder and temporarily curable for years but now seems to be permanent), I haven't listened to SRO on LP for a while.

I've been halfheartedly watching turntable prices on eBay, since my upstairs turntable is "just" a Realistic. It's not bad, except that it doesn't really hold a steady speed. If I had more electronics knowledge, I'd design and build a better speed control mechanism for it. (I've already modified it to play 78RPM.)

However, I've noticed that pricing on decent recent-model Dual turntables (with the ULM tonearm system) can often be had for less than $50...and some even come with the factory Ortofon cartridge (unless you find a seller who will throw a much better Grado on it). For what I need, it's perfect...and Dual made a damned-good turntable. Runs circles around the cheap garbage that the major-brand electronics companies are pawning off these days, and a lot cheaper than getting a real turntable from one of the high-end companies.

stefandaystrom said:
And on one specific: The "distortion" on "Our Day Will Come" is not on the first minute, it's on the first verse. But it's so specific it sounds like it's some instrument that's there on the first verse but not on the second one. Perhaps a dirty snare? I do notice on some other tracks later on there's a dirtier snare than they used on other albums, and it has a very similar sound to that "distortion".

Aside from the grizzly start to "Our Day Will Come", the entire album, even in mono, has had that over-modulation distortion on the bass. In fact, it's not as prevalent on the stereo LP due to the bass being mostly on one side. On a mono single of "Mame", which is also worn, the distortion is really bad.

stefandaystrom said:
And I haven't noticed any dropouts nearly of the magnitude as on DEF HITS! :)

You can hear the "Tijuana Taxi" dropouts on Greatest Hits, but nowhere near as bad. :D I still doubt that Deaf Hits was made from original masters. If that were the case, why does "Taste of Honey" still sound like low-rent cassette? Compared to the copy of the Mobile Fidelity pressing of Herb Alpert Presents SM & B66 that I own, no A&M CD using masters from the 60's can come even close to what this LP provides.

stefandaystrom said:
Meanwhile, I have heard TONS of CDs that sound much worse, because they had ghastly "pumping" side effects of bad noise reduction.

You've just described the Rebound (and possibly the mid 80's pressing) of Fool On The Hill. Sure, no hiss...but on closer listening, you can hear the noise reduction. :confused: I tend to hear more of the faults when listening in the car over a good system (which is usually at higher volumes, and in a closer vicinity to the speakers).

-= N =-
 
stefandaystrom said:
But how can I ask you that when I'm 7 (?) months behind on sending you those CI white labels I promised? [red face]

Heeheehee...

stefandaystrom said:
I bought plenty of CDs at local used CD stores in the early/mid 90s that either had gone or were about to go out of print (including a Jap FANDANGO that had just gone out of print then) and so far very few of them have been reissued.

Fandango is another CD that gets some action on eBay. I'm glad I bought mine when it came out...but unfortunately the last track got a scratch on the label side and won't play w/o skipping. Not like it was my favorite track, but still...

stefandaystrom said:
Meanwhile, there is one thing I think I can depend on, after hearing DEF HITS: Any reissues Herb may do in the future will sound VERY different than the previous issues. (Will any new issues of the whole LONELY BULL album be in all mono? Will every reissue have a sticker that says "many bonus dropouts included"?)

This should be a good thing! :D My preference is Lonely Bull in mono, with the stereo tracks to follow. (I prefer the unaltered originals.) I just hope that all of the searching through the master tapes results in some better results in music we already know, or maybe turns up some gems that haven't been issued before.

If eBay prices are any indication, there's still interest in TJB. Compared to Chris Montez, whose A&M career was but a blip on the radar, and he has a handful of A&M CDs available in Japan. :confused:

-= N =-
 
Rudy said:
Dual made a damned-good turntable. Runs circles around the cheap garbage that the major-brand electronics companies are pawning off these days, and a lot cheaper than getting a real turntable from one of the high-end companies.
What I have is a Dual -- an early 80s CS 515 that is mechanically still just fine, I only need to fix the hum (presumably replace some cabling) and get the cartridge upgraded and then verify everything's aligned right. My problem is that I have to rearrange a BUNCH of things (non-trivial) to be able to disconnect it and remove it from where it's "nesting" and take it to a competent repair person.
Rudy said:
Aside from the grizzly start to "Our Day Will Come", the entire album, even in mono, has had that over-modulation distortion on the bass. In fact, it's not as prevalent on the stereo LP due to the bass being mostly on one side.
So the CD doesn't sound any worse than the LP after all? That's good to know, I think. :)

stefandaystrom said:
And I haven't noticed any dropouts nearly of the magnitude as on DEF HITS! :)

Rudy said:
I still doubt that Deaf Hits was made from original masters. If that were the case, why does "Taste of Honey" still sound like low-rent cassette?
Well, that brings up a point: Someone I know swears that back in the 60s he heard a version (an early broadcast single mix perhaps?) of TOH that was missing a guitar part at each "break". If that's accurate, might that imply that "final" versions of TOH were more "bounced around" than many other tracks of the time?

And non-original masters as it all is on SRO, why does "Bean Bag" sound so much worse in terms of frequency range (it sounds almost like it was recorded over the telephone, compared to all the other tracks on the CD!)?

stefandaystrom said:
Meanwhile, I have heard TONS of CDs that sound much worse, because they had ghastly "pumping" side effects of bad noise reduction.

Rudy said:
You've just described the Rebound (and possibly the mid 80's pressing) of Fool On The Hill. Sure, no hiss...but on closer listening, you can hear the noise reduction. :confused:

No, that's a pretty mild case, compared to FOOLS GOLD or the original CD of Deodato's PRELUDE. On the latter there were changes of tens of thousands of Hz response variations over sections of some songs. It was like somebody was moving the treble control all over the place while you were listening (yuck). I've NEVER heard anything from A&M reissues THAT bad in terms of NR abuse...
 
stefandaystrom said:
What I have is a Dual -- an early 80s CS 515 that is mechanically still just fine, I only need to fix the hum (presumably replace some cabling) and get the cartridge upgraded and then verify everything's aligned right. My problem is that I have to rearrange a BUNCH of things (non-trivial) to be able to disconnect it and remove it from where it's "nesting" and take it to a competent repair person.

I'm trying to remember how the Duals were put together. I'm not sure if the cabling is soldered in place, or if it's just something like a DIN plug that plugs into the bottom of the tonearm's mounting post. (My Grace tonearm has this kind of setup.) Regardless, if it's just a hum in one channel, there's just a loose ground connection. It could be inside the turntable, or (as I've seen happen with my other interconnects), it's bad on the plug end, where it hooks to your preamp or receiver. If you don't mind the looks, it's not a big deal to put a new plug on the end. (No big deal if they don't match!) I have a few sets of cables here where, over the years, they've just quit working. Last option would be a bad wire from the cartridge to the tonearm. Other than the oxidation issue, those fragile wires tend to break if they're handled too much.

Cartridge is easy enough. Other than my Shure V15V-MR, which is about as good as a cartridge can get (and worth every penny--say goodbye to most of the inner-groove distortion), I usually go to a Grado. Those are easy to align, too, having a squared-off body. If I were in the L.A. area, I'd just stop in with my Dennesen protractor and set it up. :wink:

stefandaystrom said:
So the CD doesn't sound any worse than the LP after all? That's good to know, I think. :)

Well, I'd give the LP a slight edge, actually. If you figure the LP was pressed from a master tape in the 60's, then consider that likely the same LP master was made to produce a CD 20 years later, then there'd be a little more life to the LP's sound. Either one runs circles around a reel-to-reel copy, though--any flaws are hidden under a wall of tape hiss! :wink:

Tapes are an odd animal, though. At one point I had nearly a dozen A&M reels, and they were all uniformly mediocre--not much high end, decent separation, lots of tape hiss. Duplicated at Ampex in Elk Grove Village, IL. Verve's, on the other hand, sounded a lot better...and they were duplicated in the same plant. I could have chalked it up to bad storage, but it didn't explain why Verve's were still better than A&M's from the same facility. I recently acquired a Fantasy open reel...same deal. (The reel deal?) Sounded about as good as the Verve tapes. Asked an engineer I know (actually, could have been E. Brad Meyer), and was told that it all depended on what master tape the record company sent to the duplicating plant. I've had better luck with other labels: RCA has had some good reels (and I believe they were recorded on their own tape stock), and the couple I've heard from Columbia have been decent. Capitol, too--the Stan Kenton tape I have sounds quite good. My only criteria was that a tape be 7½"/sec. I've tried recording at the slower speed... :confused:

stefandaystrom said:
Well, that brings up a point: Someone I know swears that back in the 60s he heard a version (an early broadcast single mix perhaps?) of TOH that was missing a guitar part at each "break". If that's accurate, might that imply that "final" versions of TOH were more "bounced around" than many other tracks of the time?

That could be...they didn't have multitrack like we know it now...and I'd heard from someone familiar with A&M that said those early tracks were bounced around a lot.

stefandaystrom said:
No, that's a pretty mild case, compared to FOOLS GOLD or the original CD of Deodato's PRELUDE. On the latter there were changes of tens of thousands of Hz response variations over sections of some songs. It was like somebody was moving the treble control all over the place while you were listening (yuck). I've NEVER heard anything from A&M reissues THAT bad in terms of NR abuse...

Some odd CDs are the Columbia Jazz Masterpieces series. Best example is the Miles Davis classic Kind Of Blue. The original CD from the early 80's was horrible--there was a constant tape hiss that is reminiscent of the 7½"/sec tapes I have. Later in the 80's, this new series came out, which got rid of the hiss, but choked off the highs. It finally took until the mid 90's for Columbia to put out a good version. It's incredibly improved now--I like to tell everyone you can hear the wood in the upright bass. :wink:

One bothersome thing about Columbia's last attempt at a remastering is that they used a vintage Presto 3-channel tape machine to copy it to digital. (It was originally recorded on a Presto.) Thing is, when you hear a high sustained note from Miles' trumpet, you can hear flutter in the tone! Definitely a byproduct of the tape deck. And at this late date, there's no telling if it was the original deck that recorded it, or the Presto they used to digitize it.

I'm not really sold on the "tube remastering" part of it. While it probably would be closer to the LP's sound (the LPs would have originally been mastered on tube equipment), it's also not the cleanest signal you could get from a tape. I'd be more likely to pick a top-notch solid state deck of recent vintage to get as much clean signal off of the tape as possible. The reason tubes are "warmer" is due to the higher levels of 2nd-order harmonic distortion. It's a pleasant distortion (basically, doubling a note being played, but one octave higher), more pleasant than third (or any other odd-order) distortion. But any kind of distortion really isn't adhering to accuracy.

-= N =-
 
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